Tainted Mirrors
by ThePsychoVamp
Summary: Between Eclipse and BD. AU. After a careless decision on Jacob's part, the Quileute pack begins to see the cracks in their apparently majestic glory. Simultaneously, a friendship roots in the consequences of Jacob's mistake and the vastness of Edward Cullen's unquestionable need for help. ON INDEFINITE HIATUS.
1. A Pothole for Two

**A.N.: Happy birthday, Chloe!**

**()**

"_Doublethink _means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

– George Orwell, _1984_

**()**

Edward didn't scream.

For the toughest of humans, it would be considered an impressive feat. Edward didn't scream, but his leg did, a dozen organ pipes tunneling through every single bone of his right leg and making it vibrate, infrasounds seemingly spreading through the solidness of the member. They reached his head, too, accumulating into a drawn-out, low-pitched note, solemn and ominous, and his brain was turned into boiling mush. _Boiling_. It seemed as if the icy matter inside had melted – something too hot too close –, and the temperature of what had remained rose and rose and rose. Something boiled under his skin. Behind his closed eyelids, images wavered, shaped like crackling flames. A blurry ceiling and a pale hand. And fire – although that was just a word caught up in a whirlwind of confusion and supplications. Blood bubbling so ostentatiously that it created tears in his veins. It'd happened more than eighty years before, and Edward thought he'd screamed then, because at the time there had only been fear of the unknown.

He didn't scream now – this time he was conscious of his surroundings. La Push, in the state of Washington. Amongst evergreen trees and broken trunks, scattered over forest soil, through which nutrients leached. His fingers dug into that same soil, softened and watered by the rain that had fallen just hours before. A familiar kind of burning in his nostrils, a grumbling sound shared by the lungs of five large creatures, and a set of heartbeats so majestically loud that they pulsated through his already throbbing head, made him aware of the presence of a group of beings whose thoughts – when it came to him – were tinted by a pair of bodeful colors, black and electric crimson.

But it wasn't embarrassment that kept him quiet.

Whereas eighty-eight years before his mind had been devoured by an avalanche of agony, now it was hit by a startling memory. Muddy, like the rest of his human memories, but not so much that he couldn't describe it. And this one had a forewarning tone behind it, summoned an instinct that was common to both humans and vampires. It wasn't fear of the unknown, but a guilt-tinged fear. Of something vague, albeit predictably unpleasant. Edward had been told _several_ times not to run in the house. His seven-year old mind hadn't been able to understand _why, _since most rooms were considerably spacious, his balance was just _fine, _and even the corridor carpet, whose margins were the residence of multiple wooden doors, looked like a great running lane. There was a window at the end of that corridor, separating his comfortable dimension, warmed by the flames that crepitated in the fireplace in his father's office, from the outward world. A rather large window, he thought, in front of which the branches of the naked plane tree that faced the main street of the residential area served as beds for thick layers of snow. His morning run was interrupted by the whining of a heavy door. Edward came to a halt, breathless and red-faced, his green eyes level with his father's golden clock chain.

The sight was unexpected, and the halt, sudden. Edward inhaled sharply through his teeth, and the sound initiated a succession of unsteady heart beats within his ribcage. The clock chain disappeared below his field of vision. Tartan waistcoat. Black tie. A pair of blue eyes, round islands surrounded by a white sea, corrupted by red branched lines. A heavy hand fell on his small shoulder.

"Have you been running?"

His heart inflated now and shrunk then a trifle too fast, and there was an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach, like an ice cube had been dropped into it. Edward thought it would be wise to answer "No, Sir", even if, by doing so, he wasn't telling the truth.

A tendril of guilt embraced his sternum. The hand on his shoulder tightened its hold on the fragile bones.

"Don't lie to me."

Edward wanted to say he _hadn't _been running_, _not exactly; he'd just been walking a bit too fast. But he also wanted to tell the truth, soften it with the assurance that he was always careful. But the down-turned lines carved around his father's mouth, extensions of his hard-pressed lips, and the threatening flashing of his eyes stopped him cold. His breathing picked up, and his father's shoulder rose up like an angry wave, and–

It was the opposite of a thunderclap. The sound – a loud, dry _paft _– came first. The pain came later, hot and malevolent. It spread across his right cheek and flipped it like an earthquake, and young Edward imagined that it didn't exist at all, that there was only an undefinable, vibrating ache in its place. His throat tightened around an intangible rock, and tears sprang to his eyes. 

"Don't cry!" his father shouted, and the blurry panorama made the ice in the pit of his stomach crack. Edward Senior's large hands took hold of his trembling shoulders, and suddenly he was thrown off balance, then brought back to his original stance, pushed and pulled, and it happened twice, thrice, four times, too fast for him to understand what was really happening, and by the end of it, his brain was ricocheting off the rounded walls of his skull. His throat felt achier now, and his eyelashes were wet. "Don't cry!"

His father shook him again. This time Edward paid heed to his words, the warning in his voice, and the sob that had been building up in his gullet was pushed down with a big gulf of air, which he held within his suddenly still chest. It pressed down on the escalating hiccups but let one or two escape, curt, strangled sounds that he couldn't help freeing.

_Don't cry._

Those were timeless words.

Edward parted his lips, seeing his own dark mouth open wider and form a horrified 'o' in the wolf's gleaming mind. It didn't happen, of course. His mouth hadn't opened more than an inch before he clamped it shut, his teeth grit firmly. A warm draft had slithered into it, and as it slipped past his vocal cords, he heard a low, thin noise. The wolf's eyes flashed in alarm, his thoughts swirling around red flags but covered in a soft sheet of fine purple silk – there was a strong feeling of pride in his head, Edward understood vaguely, but there was also insecurity, detached from the former emotion. _You're not gonna scream, bloodsucker, are you? _Edward _wanted _to, the air in his chest joining the boiling sensation within his body. Brewing a cacophony as tempestuous as the howls of the organ pipes, still ringing. (God, it _hurt._) Instead, his fingers dug deeper into the earth, clinging pathetically to the roots of a fern and the rhizoids of the moss that covered the ground. Jacob, the wolf, eyed him threateningly, shushed him with his large brown eyes, before stepping back and taking a look at his work of _art_.

Mentally – and despite himself –, Jacob winced. The direction that the lower part of the leech's leg had taken formed an angle… _No_. Jacob didn't think there was an angle at all. Just two different routes under the same tunnel, the torn fabric of the bloodsucker's fancy jeans. The pale skin underneath the tears had been scratched – Jacob had heard the metallic screech created by his scraping his claws against non-human flesh –, and although (or perhaps _because_) it wasn't nearly as bad an injury as the broken leg, Jacob felt satisfied when he saw the marks. But the arched shape of the leech's back and the badly concealed horror in Cullen's coaly eyes pushed his paws backwards. His gaze drifted down to that ungodly–to the fractured leg, before being brought up again.

Was the monster _afraid_?

The irony forced a huff out of his animal mouth, what'd have been a chuckle were he in his human form. He imagined what Bella would think if she were there, standing beside her _perfect_ bloodsucker, her _so-adored_ god lying at her feet, helpless. Perhaps she'd take that crazy idea out of her head – she wouldn't suddenly become indestructible if she turned into one of _them, _because _they _could be reduced to this very easily. And _they _were nothing but vincible, lust-driven monsters.

(Monsters that could feel afraid.)

Jacob stalled, no trace of amusement in his mind. His stare had gone back to the agonized face of his enemy, the clenched jaws and the…eyes.

Wherein he saw a fearful, unexplainable apology, like the honest, regretful look of a frightened child.

"Jesus." Seth appeared at his side. His voice took on an almost effeminate quality, a few tones higher than usual. "Jesus. Fuck. _Fuck. _What have you done to him?"

This was his duty, he wanted to reply, but Seth had morphed back into his human form, and the mental connection had been cut off. His pack mate kneeled beside the twisted, motionless figure of _the thing_, his youthful face set in a displeased grimace while he examined Cullen's right leg visually, like he was _worried_.

_Like they were friends_.

Jacob's muzzle moved as he tried to get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth, and with his tongue pressed against a long, sharp canine, he watched Leah's hind legs falter slightly. A curious question on her mind, hidden behind the relief of seeing her brother out of harm's way. She shifted her sharp gaze to Jacob's paws, and a loud snapping sound echoed in her head.

She'd seen it through his mind.

But of course – everyone had.

Leah rushed off to meet the others, who had managed to cage the nomadic newborn in a tight circle, while Jacob phased back.

"Why did you do that?"

Seth's grimace stung and stamped his mind like a fresh tattoo.

Jacob bent down and untangled his denim shorts from his ankle, the familiar sound of vampire flesh being torn to shreds reaching his ears in the form of enthusiastic clapping. The flavor of a hunt was always sweet. In a sense, sickeningly sweet; in another, cool and relieving and so damn satisfying. This had been a lost hunt, but Jacob found its substitute to be much more _satiating_ than the casual leech chase. The smell of death was a blunt fingernail scraping the curves of his nostrils.

"We have rules, Seth. He's in our territory," he said, and with a repulsed look sent Cullen's way, he added, "In fact, he should've gone back to Leech Den already."

"Sam gave him permission to cross the border," Seth protested. "You know he did, and you decided to attack him anyway. Hey, you okay?"

The weight of Cullen's torso was poised on his right forearm, his black gaze fixed on the split extension of his leg. Jacob stopped his reflection-wince before it could stretch too far.

"I'm fine," Cullen said, voice reduced to a reticent murmur, eyes eclipsed by white blinds and black brushes, and Jacob thought it was a strange arrangement. It could only be the eyelashes. Too damn thick and long and dark and _unreal_. Everything connected to their kind was offensive in its sheer bizarreness. Human-looking things that were obviously not human, and _yet – _yet, from their white-washed, immaculate faces suffering could transpire. And Jacob saw in the narrowed gap between his eyebrows and the tightening of his mouth that the leech was lying.

_How cute, Cullen. Heroism almost looks good on you. _

"Edward." Sam's bass voice alerted Jacob to the presence of his leader. His muscles stiffened, touched by instinct alone. A growing tension settled in the air between them.

_Right. _It was easy to forget that bloodsuckers had names, too. He tried not to think of _his – sounded so, so wrong when Bella said it – _whenever he got too deeply immersed in his mental wanderings.

"Thank you for trying to help us."

Cullen gave him a slight, curt nod in response, and Jacob felt a recent bitterness in the back of his head morphing into simmering anger.

"We didn't need help," he said, and his voice sounded simultaneously grave and youthful, the momentary wrath that he so often wore without an overcoat on top, sewn with external calmness, weighing on his words like lead.

In fact, they hadn't needed help.

Up until now Edward hadn't considered his opportunism a bad trait; in this case, it went hand in hand with his aversion to violence. (And, ironically enough, he saw the opportunity within a violent situation.) He was not the leader of the Olympic coven, didn't in any way consider himself fit for the role, but for all intents and purposes he was their spokesperson and saw it as his duty to establish an alliance (non-alliance, non-aggressive relation, whatever someone who liked to be more exact would define it as) with other groups. Because alliances often implied being against _another_ group of allies, and that was a matter that he didn't want to involve in this particular plan. His main aim was to declare _non-war_.

Truce – that was the word. But clearly it'd been emptied of meaning long ago, and the presentiment that it was nearing its extinction had been screeching against the sharpest edges of Edward's consciousness for a while now. Renewing the intangible, informal, perhaps even petty, contract for no other reason than the fact that this generation hadn't been present back when the words of agreement had been exchanged was not enough. And neither was reforming it. There needed to be a bond, however subtle it might be. No matter how apparently useless it might be. As long as it was solid, consistent and sufficiently amicable, Edward was happy to partake in a trade of favors, a give-and-take put in practice in the name of peace. Because Bella hadn't shown any signs of feeling anything less than determined to have it her way, only her way had enough implications as it was, and Edward wasn't about to let the shape-shifters' ominous threats augment the size of the pile of problems that her decision was bound to bring. It wasn't his family's safety that truly concerned him – perhaps the collateral damage was something to think about, but for the most part the group could fend for itself. No, graver than that would be the amount of casualties on _their _front.

Everyone had to live. Stay alive, at least. That was all he could strive for. That was all he had to do – plant the bond, allow it to grow and feed it.

And hope, of course, that it'd last for as long as an olive tree lived.

The thought that he would probably still be here to see the olive tree die was rather nauseating, and it was an actual olive tree that he imagined, knowing that they could last for more than a thousand years. It wasn't the bond; that would be renovated, perhaps when these wolves ceased to be. Because these wolves _would_ cease to be. Edward saw their future sprawled out on a grand field of weeds, away from civilization, and he saw as portion by portion the field withdrew, as humans built more parking lots (_because what else could they spend their money on?)_, and as bit by bit the field met its end. Soil would become concrete, and the next weeds would sprout when they found the space to do so, but these wouldn't be the same wild plants.

In the end both weeds and werewolves were living beings, and this was their natural order – they were born, they aged, and then they died.

Even olive trees went to olive-tree-heaven at some point, saved by the prayers of Mediterraneans and their profits from gastronomic tourism.

Edward returned from his musings with a barely audible whimper, the fireball in his throat edging too close to his vocal cords. He could barely understand the climate that surrounded him, sensing only through a red haze that resentment and antagonism had become so concentrated that they were about to reach their saturation point and fall upon all the people in the area visibly. Everything seemed to be decreasing the distance between bearable and unbearable. He'd acquired the ability to zone in on something other than pain throughout a lifetime of dreadful cacophonies and agonizing bloodlust. Pick metaphysics, philosophy, translate French to Gaulish, make capitalist jokes – psychological studies showed that self-hypnosis could numb the pain. Humans were lucky. Edward couldn't keep it going for too long; his oversensitive brain had too many features, and at the very best he could only lessen the efficiency of some of them, something that required self-control, which _required_ a reasonable state of mind.

Not _this. _This hindered self-control. This put pressure on the levers, threatened to break them and erase the possibility of controlling the surplus of capacities. And if he was too far gone he couldn't do anything about it; everything'd heat up, and the thermostat would melt, with the heat of the werewolves' proximity, the heat of their thoughts and the heat of _excess _– a disharmony of heartbeats, inhales, exhales, vocal cords trembling, air swooshing with movements, leaves warring with the wind, water streaming miles away, insect claws scratching the undergrowth. A disagreement in tunes, voices shouting into his head without permission, and behind it all the long, merciless rub of a bow's hank of horsehair against the stretched strings of a violin. _It's the growing tension again_, more ominous than before. The string would break, too. And within him, with the temperature seemingly increasing – the illusion was a result of the helplessness swelling in his chest, causing his lungs to stop altogether and making him feel _wrong, _like he was suffocating, even if vampires didn't need to breathe – and the insupportable discomfort in his leg, the lack of consistency down there, the seismic waves of the horrible pain… Within him, the instinct to flee scratched desperately at his bones, more than an answer to the presence of a natural enemy, a consequence of being in such a vulnerable position.

There were five of them. Five. Caging him in. The machinery was about to go haywire. Soon Edward wouldn't be able to distinguish friend from foe. As it was, the feeling that he was in serious danger was heavy and relentless, and it was expanding quickly. It was getting more and more difficult to suppress the growling animal in him, the cornered, threatened, restless animal, which after freed would not be able to narrate its actions.

This was it. The semblance of a soul slipping from his grasp.

"He's obviously not fine."

_Seth_. Not Seth. Or anyone else for that matter. He didn't know; he couldn't possibly know what he'd do. He had to leave. He couldn't hold on for much longer.

"Really, Sherlock?"

"Shut the hell up, Jake! If there's anyone who should keep quiet right now it's you."

Edward rolled over. The pain in his leg increased tenfold, and he actually thought for less than a second, managing to pick that one phrase amongst the torrent of images and sounds colliding and dispersing in a weak imitation of the creation of the universe, that the fractured piece would pierce through his skin. His other leg kicked at the ground, trying to support and elevate the whole weight of his body, but his injured leg hurt so, so much, and he even tried to leap in one single movement, but everything was so fast, not even _he _was able to predict that. Everything was fading, he didn't really know what he was doing, and so right after he managed to move with one foot, the other tried to do the same.

The scratching hadn't stopped. The scratching had _demanded _that he run.

And the agony was blinding. It went past the limits, robbed him of his senses, made everything come to a halt.

Edward welcomed the darkness.

**()**

"Should I ask what happened?"

Sue Clearwater had the habit of weakly pretending that she wasn't interested in the answers to the questions she posed. The truth was that there was always an authoritative tone under her strong contralto voice, and so it was impossible to think that she wasn't expecting a decent reply. Leah figured it was a mom-thing. The fake nonchalance worked to put her at ease. Not that she felt uneasy – indeed, the vision of the redheaded bloodsucker puncturing the earth with his trembling white fingers, his features contorted in a myriad of variations of discomfort, had caused her hairs to stand as tall as her mother always did, but she definitely couldn't say that she felt anywhere near as bothered as her brother felt.

Seth was locked up in his room. The silence allowed Leah to hear with perfect clarity the falling of water drops onto the stainless surface of the sink. Now she felt uneasy. The house hadn't been this silent since her father's death.

"Sam sent us home." She shrugged. "He left it up to Jake to clean up the mess he made."

More than ever Leah thought that her loyalty to her pack members depended on the shape of the moon. She more or less enjoyed seeing the indignant look on Jacob's face when Sam ordered him to stay after telling the rest of the pack to leave, thinking that it served him right, even if she wasn't particularly fond of the Cullens. But, she mused, either due to Seth's affinity with them or her own individualism, she wasn't as hostile as the others as far as the Cold Ones were concerned. Or maybe she was hostile to just about anyone and didn't give a damn whom she disliked more.

Sue dropped the little square pieces of the tomato she'd been dicing into a bowl without shifting the focus of her dark gaze.

"And what did Jake do?" she asked.

Leah scratched her elbow. "You mean, what did Jake do to make Seth look like he's got a rotten plum in his mouth? Because I'm not sure who really messed up here," she said. "A Cold One was hunting in our territory, near the border. I think we could've all done fine without external help, but for some reason… You know Edward Cullen?"

"Who?"

"The mind-reader."

"I'm not sure…"

Leah opted to refer to a moment when her mom had actually seen the leech.

"The one who helped Jacob when he broke his ribs." _Well, that's ironic, _she thought.

"The blonde doctor?"

"His son."

"Oh." Sue lifted an eyebrow. "What about him?"

"He was also hunting – or he was about to hunt – near the area and must have noticed that we were in a bit of a predicament." Leah spoke hesitantly – she wasn't certain why the redhead hadn't simply ignored them. Not only wasn't it any of his business, but Leah had also been sure that she'd be able to catch the unknown vampire. It was true that the chase had been taking longer than usual, but they'd all felt confident that they'd succeed. "So he convinced Sam that he could help… There was no need, you know. I _had _him. But Sam just went along with it. It was all pretty fast."

The knife in her mother's hand stopped for a couple of seconds.

"Sam isn't supposed to–"

"Well, yeah, that all sounds incontestable, but the truth is that when Jacob got hurt the Cullens had to intervene and when the other redhead was after Isabella Swan we stepped into their territory in wolf form, so I don't think the treaty actually has any effect, to be honest."

"Leah!" Sue's voice was firm, but Leah had to contain the urge to roll her eyes. She scratched her elbow once more in an absent manner and realized suddenly that she'd expressed an _opinion_. And it wasn't related to Sam or Emily or Jake's fascination with the leech-lover. It was simultaneously spontaneous and consistent, despite its contradictory nature. More importantly – since she was used to expressing contradictory opinions –, it was right. This time it wasn't a matter of personal feelings – she looked at it from a neutral standpoint and was almost sure that she was right.

"Why don't you just report it to the Council? I think that'd be a good reason to expel me from the tribe."

Leah stood up in time with the downfall of her reasonable mood. _If only… _It was never her wish to be involved in such a mess. Losing Sam to something that he had no control over was hard enough, and now she and her brother were also immersed in this poor excuse of a life and neither of them had any control over it. For a moment she wished that her mother could take her suggestion seriously.

"Sit down. I want to hear what happened."

Leah obeyed, albeit reluctantly. The lump in her throat blocked any words that might have had the chance to escape. Her father wouldn't have this effect on her; his voice wouldn't have moved her limbs like this. It was true what most of the pack said – her mother was more of a wolf than Leah could ever hope to be. And as much as she tried to convince herself that it didn't bother her, the truth was that it _really did. _Life as the only female wolf in the pack was hard, but this was where she'd grown to feel comfortable, where she belonged. Her blood ran through her veins alongside the promise to protect her tribe from harm, and that was something to be proud of. She wanted to be good at this at least.

She bit the inside of her cheek. "So, as I was saying, it all happened very rapidly. Somehow the Cullen guy managed to outrun us, so maybe Sam wasn't wrong to have accepted his help. The bloodsucker's fast."

"Faster than you?" Sue asked teasingly, and the tension that'd been building up in the small kitchen just seconds before dissipated suddenly.

Leah squirmed in her chair. "Almost…" she lied. "Anyway, I think everyone was too caught up in the chase to really give it any thought. But Jacob was a bit ahead of us, and Cullen was just about to whip past him… Basically, he thought it'd be a good idea to distract the leech with images of the Swan girl and take the chance to break his leg in the meantime."

The audible crack that'd echoed in everyone's heads reverberated through her own now. She evoked the image of the fallen Cold One and the horror shining off his onyx-hued eyes. When she'd arrived, the redhead was already trying to conceal the pain that he was undergoing, and Leah had swallowed quietly upon seeing the state in which his leg had been left. Jacob had honed his offensive skills just for this particular leech. Leah hadn't been able to contain her own anger in the middle of it all, after Jacob's sarcastic remark. It was one thing to neglect the vampire's suffering, but it was another thing altogether to pretty much mock her brother for caring. But the actual scene was overall incommodious and spine-chilling, and that, too, had added up to her irritation. She couldn't stand seeing Seth in such distress – in fact, she might have cried more during Harry Clearwater's funeral because of her brother's sorrow than because of the fact that her father was lying in a coffin – and, damnit, it hadn't been that long ago that Jacob had received aid from that same person lying on the ground, who began to look so restless at some point that even Leah had resisted the urge to do something about it.

"Your brother is too thoughtful," Sue said quietly after a long while.

Her daughter frowned, wondering when thoughtfulness had become an inconvenient trait.

**()**

The scent of freshly wet vegetation intensified as the sky breathed down onto the surface of the planet the metallic smell of ozone, heralding the fall of more rain, as if the droplets of water that hung off the pine needles above were trying to welcome their relatives. Sam refrained from inhaling too deeply; his nostrils were inimical to the odor of cheap scented-bleach, and he was too close to its source. The weight of Edward's upper body against his own was unsurprisingly substantial – he was heavier than a human with a similar physique, but the added pounds resided in his diamond-hard skin, which was thinner than it seemed.

His brown gaze drifted along the sharp angles made by the vampire's leg, and he winced inwardly. The firm posture couldn't be lost in front of _him_. Jacob. He wanted him to stay, but the reason for giving him such an order was still unknown. His thoughts were scattered over a path that led to nowhere. He looked down at the face of the mind-reader, and his throat tightened around the unfamiliarity of the image. The red locks straying from the white forehead, more disheveled than normal. The parted lips and the relaxed eyebrows. Weren't it for the stillness of his chest, he'd look like he was sleeping.

Vaguely, Sam associated the tightness of his throat with the fact that he'd never seen a dead vampire. One that wasn't torn to pieces, that is.

It followed that he was probably in deep shit.

He heard his pack mates running towards the area nearer the beach from a far distance.

"Call Carlisle Cullen," he said in a low voice.

"Why?" Jacob's tone was defiant, and Sam uncovered the _x _in the equation, the reason why he'd ordered him to stay. The hand holding Edward's side curled into a fist.

"Jacob," he said more loudly. "Do as I say."

"Sam, he broke the treaty!"

"When you become the Alpha you can make your own decisions. But _I _am the Alpha here, and when I give someone permission to step onto our lands, it is implied that none of you will attack that person. Do you understand?"

His voice was strong and unyielding, underlining his position in the pack. He sounded as if he were quoting a law written in stone. The anger, the indignity, the danger that Jacob's mistake could bring… He wasn't supposed to disrespect his orders to begin with, but the possible consequences of what he'd done stirred one of Sam's most recent fears. The pack's volatility wasn't easy to control, and lately it seemed to him as if they were even more agitated than usual. They all spoke of a great threat, of monsters, when it came to the Cullens, and at the same time they trusted them to accept something like _this – _Sam eyed the broken leg, twisted in a dreadful manner –, as if their harmlessness swam at the bottom of a well of patience. Even Sam struggled to understand his pack's logic.

Right now he had a defenseless vampire in his arms – he could do whatever the hell he wanted to him, and tearing him limb from limb seemed at the same time like the rightest and most wrong thing to do.

"You know what? Go," he commanded. Jacob had been struck dumb by his outburst, but the snarky reply was probably waiting to roll off the tip of his tongue, and Sam felt it saturating the air as much as the smell before rain did. The irritating itch under his skin grew more difficult to ignore in tempo with the densification of the mantle of clouds above their heads. Sam thought that if he had to be in Jacob's presence a moment longer he'd burst out of his skin. He couldn't do it now, not when he still had the broken body of a Cullen against his heaving chest. Not while he was still undecided about what to do with it.

"What are you gonna do?"

"Last time I checked you didn't care," he snapped. "Now go!"

Jacob shrugged his broad shoulders and took off his cutoffs once again, before morphing into wolf form and sprinting away. Sam regretted his decision momentarily: Jacob should've been the one to call the blonde doctor; he should've been the one to take Edward Cullen home, to clean up the mess he'd made. He should've been the one in his place, staring hopelessly around, trying to decide what to do, considering the pros and the cons and the future of a pack that was so out of order that even their leader felt lost.

But he'd said it himself – he was the Alpha. He was the leader. The role of a leader was to make decisions, and the role of one who was not a leader was to complain.

He looked back to the boy in his arms. A boy – Sam didn't think he could be older than many of his pack mates in physical years. Edward Cullen was not the leader of their coven, but he, too, made decisions, or at least suggestions, and Sam thought that that was what gave consistency to the coven. He was an interpreter, a spokesperson, a radar.

And now the radar was broken. Sam couldn't yet come up with a way to explain how that had happened to the vampire's family.

He slipped his other arm under the vampire's knees, cringing freely when his skin came in contact with the ripped fabric of his jeans, and stood up carefully so as not to jostle the slender body. Edward's arm went back and forth like a pendulum as he walked towards the intangible border. A thunderclap interrupted his train of thought, meeting the expectation that had been present in Sam's subconscious, and the rain began to pour, wetting them from head to toe.


	2. Of Lions and Tamers

**A.N.: I know. It's been a while. But here it is and I hope you all enjoy it, especially you, Chloe! 'Till next time!**

**()**

"To understand it with thinking would be to find them all equal."

– Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa's heteronym), _If, After__ I Die_

**()**

Drifting boat. For a moment Edward thought that he was inside one. Maybe the boat floated upon the persistent weeping of a river, waters that sobbed softly while they waddled towards the sea. He had the vague impression that his head moved back and forth, and at the same time that it was led by the current in a definite direction. Pale gray light flickered between the dark edges of his vision when the raindrops that had been sitting upon his eyelashes slid upwards. He breathed in. The air was thick with the scent of pinewood and mud. A heterogeneous mass of greens and browns ran off the gray palette above. Edward was almost sure he was inside a drifting boat, with his neck hanging off the gunwale, looking at the passing foliage from below.

From so far down that all of it seemed unbelievably immense and magnificent, as if he were merely an ant.

He felt an odd kind of vulnerability, the kind that is welcomed with a sigh, one that assured him in a whispering, soothing voice that if he got hurt he would hold no responsibility, and he thought hazily that the slightly nauseating freedom could only derive from the lack of matter underneath most of his body.

No, he couldn't be in a boat. Unless the boat had only some timbers left and was sinking without his notice.

Edward blinked.

At first a cold tremor travelled through his body, like an ice spire drilling into his insides, and his thoughts flitted from the certainty that he was in a sinking boat to the new-found sense that he was moving through air. And then there was the shock of a hot surface in direct contact with his skin, awaking his half-submersed consciousness. Memories rushed past the forefront of his mind. He fell; a pair of jaws countered the curves of his legs; pressure on the left side of his leg, too much weight against the right side. There had been a disagreement between the two, and instead of following the same direction they had tried to reach a common point. More than one point. Everything felt so disconnected. Edward came upon the realization – amidst a wind whirl of sensations – that his leg was broken in more than one place. _For certain_.

"It's okay. We're almost there."

_There. _Edward searched for a particular thread in his mind, one out of a million that connected him to another rational being. The one that stood out in the tapestry was the thickest, the reddest, and the shortest. He recognized Sam's voice, the deep and naturally neutral tone beneath it, and a brusque exhale escaped his lips when he became aware of the other's proximity. He was… being carried? Yes, he thought. Yes, he was, and very vaguely he remembered the cold that had seeped into his flesh when Carlisle had rushed past buildings and alleys that had stunk of sickness and decay towards his house in the woods with a deadly-ill teenager in his arms. This time the arms that held him, the body against which he sagged, the shoulder that grazed his cheek, held within them a permanent fire. Edward didn't have to fight the urge to recoil from the blistering heat: the urge was there, the _scratching_ was there, but the energy that he needed to move was trapped within unknown limits. He was paralyzed.

And that wasn't helping Sam's case at all.

When he took notice of two other threads, more familiar and – therefore – easier to pick out, he sought to rummage through the mist that'd fallen over his own mind. Sam was about to walk into the wolf's den. Figuratively. In truth he was doing the exact opposite, but the danger was all the same too great for Edward to allow it to get closer. Jasper and Rosalie weren't like the rest of his family. Their volatility had a sort of plausible rationality behind it, an understandable wariness with which they'd been left after having brushed against the grunge of the world and suffered by its hands. At times they saw as threats mere changes in their secluded, hidden routine, like when Bella had slid into the picture and Edward had slid into the space between her and that van, putting his family's secret in jeopardy. His sister and brother had been planning to get rid of her, and Edward had pushed with all his might, poured a generous amount of effort into stabilizing things. Restarting the cycle was imperative – he knew, as if he'd been bitten with the edginess of his siblings' thoughts, that if Sam so much as plunged into the clearing surrounding the Cullen house, that if he so much as attempted to explain that a member of his pack had attacked a Cullen, he would get hurt. However severely.

And Edward wasn't willing to take the risk.

Meanwhile Sam fretted internally. He was drenched, and so was the vampire in his arms. Darkness was creeping behind the fuliginous mass of clouds above, with a night storm on its way. Raindrops embedded in the soil turned the latter into slippery mud, and the greenery seemed to shift behind a crystal curtain, with Sam seeing it through layers of falling water. His werewolf senses picked on the denseness of the surrounding atmosphere. The air was charged with electricity, and the rumbling of an oncoming thunderbolt pervaded the heart of the woods. Edward Cullen was awake, but just barely; his raven-wing lashes quivered weakly against Sam's roaring chest, and he could only imagine how absolutely _shitty _the leech had to be feeling, the physical pain he had to be going through. He had to take a sharp, earth-scented breath to quiet down the welling rage within, and right after the brusque inhale he became aware of an addition in the set of sounds around him, underlying the continuous lashing of the rain and the growling of the electrostatic skies. He looked down. Edward was saying – trying to say something.

"You need to… you need to t-turn around."

Sam's steps faltered at first, until he finally came to a halt. Part of him wanted to see his own hands wrapped around that thin, pale neck, because he was in enough trouble to begin with, and enigmas weren't exactly welcomed. The other part, however, wanted to wipe out the flicker of doubt in his head, telling him that if vampires could pass out they could also mumble a torrent of incoherent garbage.

He wanted to convince himself that there was someone whom he could rely on. And though Edward Cullen had venom behind his blade-sharp teeth and a non-beating heart, he wanted to believe that he could be the one to tell him what to do.

"What?"

Edward's jaw bone gained a sort of protruding quality when he winced. Sam could see the difficulty behind his effort, the fight to keep his head raised and his eyes open and his pain suppressed. Suddenly, he seemed weak and strong all at once. "Jasper and Rosalie are the only ones home," he ground out. "They won'–" He squeezed his eyes shut, and a little brooklet ran down the bridge of his Greek nose and sank to his lip. Sam worried that he'd slip into unconsciousness, or lack of responsiveness, when the lines between his eyebrows were smoothed down and a tired breath escaped his mouth. But he went on, "–let you go."

Then he was a dead weight in his arms, the top of his spine curved strangely over his bicep once again. Sam was relieved, for some reason. Perhaps because none of the rules imposed by his tribe, the stories told by the Elders, implied that shape-shifters had to be sadists. He hoped Edward had lost his awareness completely. Hoped he wasn't aware of the state his leg was in.

He did turn around, and his bare feet squished mud and wet moss all over the intangible circle round his feet. Yet he stalled upon the sight of woodland gathered into a familiar frame. Ferns drooped under a blitzkrieg of rain, and there were dead-wood smithereens scattered over the ground, and the hemlocks and cedars and firs were joined above in a battle of evergreen needles and leaves – and if he slipped past this one spot he'd be on his way to La Push, where Edward was not allowed to go. But he wasn't _going _anywhere. Sam was taking him. And surely his tribe would choose the Alpha's safety over the fear of a broken dead weight. Almost certainly – if he got a hammer and managed to punch it through his pack's stone-headedness. He felt like he probably identified with his own sarcasm, but now was not the moment for an introspection, so he fled. This time he really did run, and held on tight to the disturbance in the vampire's leg, shielding it with the crook of his elbow, lest he be shown to Carlisle Cullen with a missing limb instead of some broken bones.

He was forced to cut into the unpaved road that led to his house at a certain point. The rammed earth was seen through the trunks in the edge of the forest when the fading scent of his pack mates guided him towards it, and he decided that he ought to step onto known land before their smell dissolved. He didn't have time to go into German Shepherd mode anyway. The two-story house stood timidly amongst clusters of spruces and cypresses, under an overcast sky that'd relieved itself of a good part of its frustrations. Now only a scarce drizzle descended upon the area, and lightning struck across the darkened horizon in a series of distant coughs, no longer accompanied by the wrathful snarling from before. He was still running, as if the night was crawling to get him. It had to have been past dinnertime. Emily and the others hadn't waited for him; he could hear the water in the sink running and bouncing off the dishes, the voices of at least three of his pack mates disrupting the usual quiet of the humble house.

The front door shrieked with the force of Sam's shoulder barreling it into the kitchen. It swung around the hinges, and it thudded against the wall, and dirt shot through the air and sprayed the floor. A wet disarray perturbed their magging.

"Dude, she _just _cleaned the floor–What the hell?" Embry cut himself off upon the vision of his leader holding the _enemy. _Sam wanted to ask him if he thought it smart to sense the smell of leech nearby and continue sitting and babbling.

He searched for his anchor, his source of security. Emily's eyes had gone wide, but she didn't stall. She advanced towards the working replica of a phone that she'd brought from her grandfather's house after his passing, because she was clever and fantastic and Sam was so glad that the spirits had chosen her for him. "Do I call Carlisle Cullen?" she asked, the handle already in her hand.

"Yes," he said in a quick exhale. "Tell him his son is hurt."

The stairs creaked under the spoiled carioca drill he had to do to climb up to their bedroom. It was a narrow way, and Sam could cringe at the mere idea of Edward's injured leg bumping, or even grazing, the wooden banister. The body of the Cold One was laid upon his bed, with so much care, so slowly, he'd swear there was hot hair rising off the blankets, and when he removed his arms from underneath the leech he was– His muscles tingled with the sudden absence of the freezing cold in contact with his skin, and it was strange, uncomfortable even. Perhaps he'd been holding on to the bloodsucker because in some vague way his pack's future depended on it.

_Goddamn. _The rocking anxiety that'd been encapsulated in him when he was alone with Jacob in the forest expired bit by bit now, like a trail of smoke injected into the air right after the fire's dying out. But he was worried still. Edward Cullen was a mess below his waist, and if there was something that Sam knew about vampires was that the clinical limpidity of their skin, the pale subtleness of their movements, extended to their mindset. Even nomads were careful and clean, fleeting past people's awareness in a flash that couldn't've been more than a white sunray darting through space. Messes only merged into their vocabulary when there was trouble within their own circles. The Cullens were certainly too _vampireless. _Edward shouldn't have gotten involved.

And Sam shouldn't have accepted his help. Or at least he should've waited, acted upon the right opportunity, when perhaps none of his pack mates held any particular grudge against one of their members.

Emily had just reached Carlisle when Sam rushed into the kitchen. Embry and Quil had their eyes poised over her tense posture, the hand that'd curved along the sinuous line of her waist as she informed the coven leader of what had occurred. Or, at least, the result of what had occurred.

"Tell him to wait behind the treaty line. Embry and Quil will go and pick him up."

But the boys didn't move. Sam's irritation was sparked up. "Do you guys need a _hoist_?"

Finally they stood, hesitant as they walked past their leader. Embry's steps faltered when a cascade of water drops speckled with silver moonlight and the warm glow inside the kitchen fell too close to his skin through the ample doorway. "Do we bring him here?" he asked awkwardly.

"In a whole piece, if that isn't too much to ask." Sam nodded curtly, dismissively. His patience was wearing thin. But the voice of his imprint assuring the leech doctor that his presence was requested by the Quileute Alpha ironed his wrinkled nerves, and he felt like he could talk to Jacob now. Without the impending weight of the possible consequences of his actions bearing down on him. He rolled his gaze all along the tidied-up appearance of the room and let it stray to the overwrought body of his second-in-command. From where Sam was standing he could see the veins in his brown arms palpitating with an angry flush, turned green by the hue of his skin and enlarged with the flex of his muscles. It should be a sign of nervousness, but, Sam noticed, the tightening around his eyes betrayed the anger festering inside him.

Which brought Sam back to a state of bone-deep tension. Jacob had no reason to be angry.

"Why did you bring him here?" Jacob said from below the end of his throat, and he looked like a wolf already without having phased.

"There was no other safe place to go," he explained. Neutrally. He wouldn't cause a stir. Not now.

Jacob didn't reply – not that he could do so without embarrassing himself. After all, none of the wolves were sufficiently laid-back as far as the Cullens were concerned, not enough to speak to them through any form besides Edward's mindreading. Neither Sam nor anyone else in the pack would be well-regarded if they barged into leech territory in human form.

Although Sam _would_ have done just that, if Edward hadn't stopped him. Perhaps, beneath the hatred and the so-called mistrustfulness, there lay the dormant certainty that the Cullens wouldn't hurt him. A surmise that had been proved wrong, because _Jasper_ and _Rosalie _were apparently not the most tamable of leeches. It was with evident surprise that Sam wondered at his own lack of anger at the thought that despite their discreetness, their approachable habits, an imminent danger fizzed, effervescent, within their coven, and after all there _was_ some hostility on their side as well , even if it was well-guarded – and he marveled tacitly at the reasonable explanation. For his lack of anger. All of it sounded very familiar, until he realized – didn't his pack act in the same way, constantly, unquestionably, very often losing points in a match of courtesy?

The Cullens always won that one, like they needed to compensate for something. And, with his eyes straying to the strained tendons in Jacob's neck, Sam thought that perhaps the term "tamable" was not applicable to the Cullens. Maybe, after all, they were all – or most of them were, at least – already tamed.

And in the light of the recent events, Sam got the sense that the taming ought to be done somewhere else. On his side of the field.

On Quileute land.

**()**

Edward's nose tickled in response to the scent of freesia filtering through his nostrils, and his throat flared up like the burners of a gas stove. At the same time, Carlisle's thoughts delved into his hearing range, crossed the undefined borders of the wide spectrum of his mind, and Edward was startled into full awareness, the panic in the back of his head fleeing against the underside of the surface. Bristling against it. Bella was with him. She was coming here, and Alice wouldn't see it – if something happened, Alice wouldn't see it, and everyone around here was so _unpredictable, _more harmful than they seemed when it came to his kind, and what if… Carlisle also had a cover of granite for skin and the strength of a thousand men flowing through his fingers. Like Edward. That hadn't been of much use that evening, or else he wouldn't be here in the first place, with his leg shouting through waves of sonic pain, stretching across his insides in a permanent, quaking scream that bounced off the shattered center of his kneecap. He pushed down the liquid agony building up in his throat and threatening to wind through his vocal cords with a force that'd make them vibrate with the reflection of the pain spread all over his leg.

_Don't cry. Don't scream. Don't_ breathe.

She was coming here. He could hear her pounding heart fleeting past all the other heartbeats, voices, noises, tormenting miscellanies of sound. He could hear the swishing of her raincoat against her – thankfully – protected body, and every second was a ragged exhale ricocheting off the sudden fullness of his chest, an inflated bubble of hope wavering under the dawning of a succession of fearful thoughts. Edward loved her. He needed her. Perhaps in some other dimension where the flesh of his leg could be bandaged and his vitals monitored and his body weakened by the dripping in a morphine bag – perhaps then he'd be much more comforted by her presence. But he was a monster. Hours before he'd felt his free-will dwindling under the instinctive urges of the precipitous void of his vampire mind, and he was still shaken, suspended over the possibility of falling again onto the ever-present backyard of inexistency of thought, absence of control over his horrifying, inhuman strength. Blackness.

Visions of Bella's body sprawled out on the ground, twisted, possibly broken, purple instead of pale cream on _whatever _spot, even if there was only one, were added to the imagery always imbued in his perfect memory, in which she was always standing beneath a cracked awning, threatening to fall over her head. Too many occasions during the course of her relationship with him had put her in danger, and Edward wished she would understand that she had in her all the beauty of strength and fragility combined, humanity's parameters ironically smeared together in a multitude of possibilities, her own unique mental make-up, quirks and stories and habits that belonged solely to her and were entitled to _stay alive, _filling her from the inside out with loveliness and _life._ That her body was copper and aluminum for the electricity of her soul, and that she needed to be _careful _with it. To be careful with herself.

And lastly he wished she would realize that she was beautiful and amazing, and he was dangerous and wormy and _just not good for her._

"He's upstairs," Sam informed, and his voice was lost in the all-encompassing haze in Edward's head. Bella was close. The wet-dog smell, having glued itself to the inner walls of his nose, was suddenly not so bothersome; the sweetness of her scent dried up the reeking humidity that infested the air, if only slightly, though it sang to the venom in his throat. Their feet clunked against the wood of the stairs and the sound rebounded off the plastered ceiling and shot through his aching skull.

"Gosh," Bella said thinly, her breath catching in a tangle of sensations projecting such an unfamiliar image. She practically flew to the other side of the room, vertigo put aside: she fell next to him on her knees, and her bones bumped against the floor in a thud that echoed. A thud that sounded somehow like a bullet that'd been fired through _his _knee. But it was just him feeling the pain in full-force, without the unreliable aid of his mental wanderings. He winced, folded his hands in tight, white rolls. The marble surface of his stomach caved into itself. "I called you, but you wouldn't pick up the phone," Bella mumbled. Like she was trying to have a private conversation when there were three other people with supernatural hearing in the room. "You were supposed to come to my place. I-I thought you'd _left _me again…" She stopped then. Her voice had been riding down a low hill, becoming gradually quieter, and Edward sensed the phantom of the suffering he'd caused her in the room, as present as any other person there.

_No, I'll never leave you_, he wanted to say, but his throat was clogged with fire and whimpers. If a mere fend showed between his teeth, he wouldn't contain himself. _Only if you want me to. _He looked at her, at the shimmering trail of water running along the reddened tissue of her lower lids, and felt guilty. He was failing again, by not doing anything at all. He shook his head slightly, hoped she would understand that the last thing he wanted was for her to return to the state in which she'd been in the months after his departure.

As small and broken as she seemed to have been in the memories that Jacob was showing him. An ever-present ache blazed up, white-hot, somewhere in him. Vampires couldn't locate it – not this kind of pain. They could only feel and _deal, _because it was everywhere. It twisted around their every nerve, every cell, everything they had left, and had them silently wishing they could sleep their existence away. And it all started with a simple thought. Two, in fact.

_Bella in pain._

_Your fault._

"Edward, son," Carlisle said, and suddenly the image of a zombie-like Bella faded from both his and Jacob's mind. Edward realized– Jacob hadn't been showing _him_ anything. The memory had just merged into his mind.

_It's the knee. I can't rip it off–_

"Why'd you even consider that?" Edward groaned. It was the most he'd spoken in more than a few hours. It was possible after all not to let the pain in his leg be translated into a series of dreadful noises, as acute as it was, but something had kept his mouth locked. His tendency to be quiet and inconspicuous, most likely. Or–

Fear.

"What?" Bella rushed out. "What's going on?"

Carlisle pulled a chair and sat on the side of the bed. "I'm afraid Edward's injuries won't be easy to fix," he said, and his hands started tearing the fabric of his jeans in a straight cut. "You might want to look away, Bella."

She jutted out her chin in a defiant look, her back molding onto a straight line. Edward saw her martyrly tendencies dim under the inappropriateness of the situation and the reversal of their roles. "No," she countered. "I can handle it."

Carlisle slid his whiskey-hued gaze upwards, an edge of confusion present in the slight wrinkle between his eyebrows. "Alright," he murmured, and turned back to his work, followed the cut up to Edward's thigh, and–

Bella gulped. Loudly. There was a moment during which Edward's head turned silent, like every head in the room had flat lined, or fallen into sound-isolated boxes, but images showing the same thing from different angles expanded in his mind, either juxtaposed or superimposed, and he could admit that the lower part of his leg falling out of its place to the side like a tree branch barely hanging on, a dislocated piece, was kind of a horrible sight. A wide and intricate ramification of cracks crawled out of a disfigured epicenter located in what had previously been his kneecap and spread across the surrounding regions. An almost translucent substance tainted with the lightest hue of purple slithered out of the fend on the side of his knee, the mouth that opened in a twisted smile around the curve of the middle of his leg.

"You're losing venom," Carlisle said calmly, but his thoughts pivoted around a formation of concern and fear. He was, Edward remembered – he'd felt it drain out of him in the woods and now he felt it dampening his skin and soaking the bed. "And you haven't been feeding," Carlisle added with an undertone of displeasure.

Edward's conscious sank under the weight of his father's disappointment.

"What does that mean?" Bella asked, and in a moment her eyes brightened with what seemed to be an _idea. _"Is he going to need blood?"

"No, I am _not,_" Edward hissed. Jacob's mind got a lot quieter in a second. He was relieved that Bella's wish to become a volunteer had been shot down.

"I'm afraid this can't be done here," Carlisle sighed. _But moving him now is not recommendable._ "It would've been easier if there was simply a fractured bone, but it's in the knee. That's a particularly fragile part of the body, even for vampires…"

"It's not just the knee," Edward corrected. "There's something wrong…above. Below, too."

Carlisle inspected his leg more closely. Unnecessarily. Edward supposed he'd gained the habit after years of dealing with human patients. But then he chanced a look at the other side, the other fend, and Edward saw his inspection get frighteningly close, microscope-close, and he leaned his head back and counted the little humidity patches on the ceiling so as not to be so strongly reminded of the agonizing throbbing in his femur. He sensed a vibration in the air; the blue veins beneath Bella's skin, pulsating with the sweetness of her human condition, appeared in the corner of his eye and pressed down on the distance between them, like she was… about to hold his hand.

"Don't," he said abruptly. _Don't get close. I'm not okay. I'm going to hurt you. Please._ He imagined her fingers threading through his while Carlisle was holding up a mirror of the inside of his leg and the reflection was glaring at him like an ultraviolet sunray and Edward was too overwhelmed, too out of touch with anything besides the physical pain, and unconsciously his hands contracted until Bella's fragile bones broke with a choral snap, and, God, _no_–

He heard her breath catch in her throat, and cursed himself for hurting her in a different way. Again. "I just wanted to give you some comfort," she mumbled, half-guiltily and half-defensively, her temper and her self-sacrificial nature bending towards one another. Edward was simultaneously mad and endeared, responding always rationally and irrationally all at once.

"It's just splintered," Carlisle said, and twisted in his seat to look into the Cheshire crater on the other side. Meanwhile Jacob's arm snaked around Bella's shoulders in a gesture of opportunistic consolation that had Edward holding his breath, trying to stop the growth of poison ivy in his chest, as Bella leaned into his touch; but beneath the jealousy, beneath his insecurities, Edward was glad that in the moments when her heart bled and her bottomless brown eyes shimmered with tears she had someone to offer her solace.

And, sometimes, with astounding, controversial vehemence, he wished that she had chosen Jacob instead.

"But this one is fractured," Carlisle muttered, and sat up slowly. His eyes brightened to a roasted yellow under the light beaming down at them from the ceiling. He stared at Edward. Rather unhappily. "The venom's too weakened by the lack of blood in your system to heal these as fast as it should."

_Edward, you know you shouldn't go too long without feeding._

"I know," he whispered. "I'm sorry."

He'd fallen into the same mistake for the hundredth time, let his trust in his self-control swell and overlap Carlisle's wishes. Disrupted the full safety of everyone. Humans cowered under the sight of him so phantasmagorically pale and tense and thirsty, but worse than that they were, at the same time, more easily lured in; unbeknownst to many of them, their eyes preferred contrasts over brightness, and in that way they tended to look closer, squint, try to guess, and unconsciously they put his family in the kind of position they never wanted to be in.

All of that because he got lost in these useless and unexplainable reveries where he was neither human nor vampire and didn't need to drink _blood._

"The best I can do now is putting your knee back in place and hope that all the fragments will assemble after you've fed." Carlisle's mouth moved almost imperceptibly to the side. He didn't think it wise to move him in any way now (nor did he think that his plan would have the desired results), but they couldn't stay there forever. And beneath that layer of his mind, Edward noted, Carlisle feared that the true nature of his family would ever be put on display in front of the Quileute tribe. Edward couldn't feed _there._

"So he _does _need blood," Bella interjected, and Jacob cringed. And Edward almost did, too.

But Carlisle had a different idea, and as strange as it sounded Edward would happily agree as long as Bella's skin remained intact.

"Bella," Carlisle said. "If you concede me this one favor I will be eternally grateful."

**()**

Emily tightened her hold on the end of the hand rail. She eyed Sam's back, now rippling less visibly under his shirt, from what she supposed was a safe distance, and found it strange that despite being the Alpha's mate her contact with the Cold Ones had been kept to a bare minimum. Their apparently inevitable inimicality had never been of much interest to her anyway. No adverse matters or people _were_ of any interest to her, in fact, because they demanded some hostility from her, and that was something Emily had a hard time mustering.

She fidgeted unobtrusively. Sam was very nervous. Perhaps to an external watcher he was simply a quiet person by nature, but she was sure, with the certainty with which she knew that werewolves were real, that when he stood like that, with his shoulders slightly hunched and with his fingers twitching occasionally like he needed to use them for something, that he was trying to filter a torrent of worries in the best and most discrete way he could.

"Do you happen to own any antiques?" Carlisle asked suddenly. "Something that you don't need or want any longer. Relatively small objects."

Sam's brow flattened in blank surprise, and he twisted in his root-covered spot to look at her. "Do we?"

Emily gave him a short nod, and maneuvered herself around Jacob to get to the wardrobe that'd been pushed up against the wall. There was a little wooden jewelry box that'd never been filled with any jewelry at all there, and she supposed that whatever Carlisle was planning to do with it wasn't of any relevance whatsoever. She handed it to him with a smile. He smiled back, and it felt natural. Being in their presence, with both of them in the same room, despite the circumstances and the odd fluidity of Carlisle's movements, felt natural. Almost, at least. There'd been some discomfort at first, because they were so _pale. _And somehow they exuded a cold aura, and she understood from her own reaction that she wasn't supposed to get close to them. But more uncomfortable even was thinking that one of them was in pain and the other was trying to help him and both of them had treated Jacob when he'd broken his ribs and there she was wishing they'd leave soon in order for everything to go back to normal.

When Quil had imprinted on her two-year-old niece, she had been disgusted and divided. The idea was repulsive, but so was the thought of blaming Quil for something he had no control over; now Sam's explanation rang in a haunting echo in her mind and she just found it _unfair_.

Perhaps Sam hadn't given it much thought – at least he hadn't shown many signs that he had done so –, but when she'd asked why he'd brought Edward to La Push his reply had made her feel grateful to someone she hadn't even talked to.

Maybe Sam hadn't quite realized it. That he had been saved by the enemy.

And now the enemy had her old and unused jewelry box in his hand, and Carlisle's paper-white fingers were carefully poised over the sides of his leg, over a couple of flannel cloths that were now damp with venom. Another subtle sign, but it was one of those that one could cover up with a laugh easily. Emily had never met a doctor who was _gentle _or careful. Even the nice ones prioritized the diagnosis over the patient's comfort. But Carlisle's hands curved around his son's knee as if it were a bubble that he was trying not to burst. It wasn't necessarily bad – Emily supposed that was why being in the same room as them felt natural. They were strange, but perhaps only by human standards.

Carlisle turned to Sam, who had begun to scratch the side of his face slightly. "How did this happen?" he asked, and his voice was carried to the spot where Emily was standing like fluvial water flowing over moss.

"I did it," Jacob replied, and neither Sam nor Emily found it surprising that he would admit it so promptly, though Carlisle's yellow eyes widened slightly.

"Jacob…" A hint of wariness broke through the polished marble of his white forehead. His shoulders rose subtly under his blue shirt, and now– now Emily's heart beat against the back of her throat. How odd. One moment she was only minimally bothered by the sight of him, and the other she was imagining him in a field of drained corpses taken out of one of those stories that the Elders told at bonfires. She realized that their cover, or the positive paleness of their aura, making the darkness fade on the edges, was very fragile. Either they were pleasantly warm, verging on alluring, or they were ice-cold. No in-betweens.

And Carlisle had merely tensed. She'd witnessed so much worse. Suddenly, she found her slight fear ridiculous, but it still didn't go away.

"He broke one of the rules in the treaty," Jacob said, and his mouth shifted in distaste when he looked down at Edward. "He crossed the border–"

"I gave him my permission," Sam cut in. Emily had sensed his hesitation, his tiptoeing over a thread-thin line with no end. His leadership was always a reason for thinking everything through, although… Ever since _the _accident, Sam had been much more contained, more inclined to find safety in his self-control. Perhaps unconsciously he'd grown up, and though she wished it'd been for a different reason Emily was glad that he had. "A stray newborn invaded our lands, and Edward offered to help us catch him."

Emily expected Jacob to retort, counter argue in some way, but instead he fell completely silent, with his fists turned to steel by his sides, and he eyed the vampire that lay in the bed like he had a bland bubble gum stuck to the roof of his mouth.

Carlisle turned back to his son, and there was a quick exchange of looks that reminded Emily that there was a mind-reader in the room.

"I will explain later," Edward said quietly, very softly, but Emily was startled by the sound of his voice, because she couldn't recall having heard it before. He'd been there for a while, and he was the _reason _why they were gathered in their bedroom, and yet: she hadn't quite… felt his presence. Not _his. _It was almost as if he'd blended into the paintings on the walls and the pillows behind his back. He was there, but it was as if there was only the _idea _of him and it was a vague one.

And from the way he spoke, she deduced that he meant to keep it that way.

Outside the rumbling of an engine was cut off with a purr. Emily assumed that Bella was back from Forks. It seemed also that she was the one Carlisle had been waiting for, because he removed the cloths on the sides of Edward's knee and laid his hands upon them with a quick and practical shift of his whole body. Now he did seem like a human doctor. His fingers pressed on the surface of his son's leg with a new resolution.

There was a moment of silence and tension, during which Emily sensed a wave of anticipation ingraining the air like mustard gas. Bella's footsteps echoed in the house as she climbed the stairs to their bedroom; Embry and Quil spoke in hushed tones – well, in a lower tone than usual – while they followed her. Her arms shielded a small mountain of fiberglass tape as if the rolls were her shrieking chicks, and she had time to share a casual look with Emily before a piercing noise, like the chains of a saw screeching against a block of granite, filled the room with terror and… sympathy. Emily let her breath linger in her lungs, out of the atmosphere pressing down on their heads, heavy with the reverberation of Edward's scream.

It was an unexpected, startling scream, but only because Emily had accustomed herself to his silence, his inconspicuousness, and when Carlisle had pushed the disconnected pieces of his leg (so harshly – Emily assumed that it was necessary, but her wince didn't disappear) she was sucked into a different reality, where Edward was a person who _felt_ things and couldn't contain himself. The pain in his voice shook off any hope that all would turn out for the best. Emily registered with some worry the tightness around her fiancé's jaw bones, saw Bella's eyes open wide and her bottom lip fall, numb with the unexpectedness of the moment, and watched Jacob's forehead wrinkling unexplainably.

And lastly she noted that the scream had lasted less than a few seconds, but something else followed. It was one of those sounds that rose from beneath the bed sheets in the middle of a restless night, when there were bugs biting someone's flesh and they had the urge to scratch themselves, when they stayed awake wondering if the itch would be gone by sunrise and staring a hole into the ceiling, asking some deity to just _put them to sleep. _Something so simple, with no tragic undercurrent, explained the soft, quiescent despair surging from Edward's grimacing mouth. Like it wasn't supposedly that serious, it'd be gone soon, but at the same time it was terrible.

She also noticed all of a sudden that his hand was clenched around the shattered fragments of her jewelry box, and a trail of sawdust weaved through his fingers. His white, inhumanly strong fingers, capable of snapping something so hard in two.

Now she understood why Carlisle was so gentle.

"It's alright. You'll be okay soon," he said to his son, and somehow Emily felt like an intruder. There was a shift in his ways, from clinical to… affectionate, and everything seemed blurry at first, until Emily realized that her vision wasn't suffering from any worrying disturbances – quite simply, the sharpness of their features, the marked counters of their bodies, seemed to have been softened. It was the way Carlisle leaned over his son, the slightly downward elongation of Edward's mouth, the pain in his eyes seeming in some way very young. Vulnerable.

She didn't forget that they were vampires, and her chest ached a bit all the same.

"If it's not too much of an inconvenience, I would like some assistance," Carlisle said, and Sam was the first to move.

Bella, however, held herself in a stationary pose, with the fiberglass rolls in her arms, the white of her eyes damp and abundant around the brown irises. A hint of confusion marred the pale smoothness of her forehead.

And her lips curved around the monster prints left by beastly disappointment.


	3. Spotting the Radical Determinist

**A.N.: Thank you to those who followed, faved, and reviewed up until now. This is a lighter chapter in terms of paragraphing and vocabulary, so you weary folks can breathe out. Anyway, I hope y'all will enjoy the chapter and I'd love to know what you think! **

**()**

"Call me a safe bet; I'm betting I'm not."

– Brand New, _The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot_

**()**

The moment Carlisle's Mercedes countered the sharp angle taken by the deserted road they followed, Edward breathed out in relief. Humans were hard to listen to, but werewolves managed to be _worse. _It was as if the heat of their bodies ascended repeatedly to the interior of their heads, and all of that was passed around like cigarette smoke, hot and toxic and plainly unpleasant, and Edward often got the sense that his skull was filled with it. For all that he respected them – in such a manner that it didn't actually surpass common courtesy – being in their presence was just not… nice. At all. And inevitably it added to his vague wariness of them.

Perhaps more than the fact that his leg was in a cast because one of them had almost snapped it in two. Since, after all, that'd been voluntary. As long as Jacob only harbored such ill will towards _him, _things would be mildly fine; their volatility, on the other hand, was a cause for concern, but Edward had gone over this, hundreds of times, and he was tired of emphasizing their unpredictability in his own head and tired of worrying and tired of _thinking._

He closed his eyes to the view of a windshield standing firm and transparent against a net of raindrops, woven with night shadows. Bella's ambrosial scent was a weak fan relieving his nose of the mutt stench left there like an unwanted gift, a creepy jack-in-the-box, but it spun at the entrance of his throat and filled it with wet heat. His venom slithered past the underside of his tongue, crawled over his teeth, and he _hated _this – not the liquid fire in his gullet, but the vitriol creeping like a reptile over the inside of his mouth, naturally meant to hurt others. To hurt her.

Anyway– these days he had a better hold of himself, and when the dulcetness of her smell didn't remind him of what he was it slipped into his lungs and bathed their cold interior in her warmth, and, Christ, he'd be giving in to inexistency of thought, too, but amazingly it'd be _white._

"Oh, um…" Bella said under her breath. Edward heard something vibrate against her pulsing flesh. He opened his eyes, and the buzzing radiance of her cell phone screen glared at him in the dark. It pointed up at her whitened face, pronounced the shadows on her cheeks, enhanced the darkness of her hair – she looked like a ghost.

She looked like him.

"Is it Charlie?" he guessed. It was past eleven – the Chief must have considered starting a search party already. Edward took note of her hesitation, and wondered if she was thinking of rejecting the call. He empathized quietly, anticipatorily, with her father. She did that too often, letting the fear for her safety fester inside those who loved her. "He's probably worried, Bella," he said softly, and hoped she would pick up.

The edges of her button nose expanded with the huff that she let out, annoyed with…something. "I know that," she muttered. "What do I tell him?"

"Just tell him there was an accident, and that you'll be home soon."

Hadn't she told him _anything _beforehand? Surely Charlie would panic if he saw her truck in the driveway and no sign of her in the house, no note on the fridge, or anything to tell him that she hadn't simply been whisked away by some other human monster, or lost herself in the woods like when… Like when Edward had left her. But, no, surely _someone _had told him something – if not Bella, then Carlisle, who _had _after all picked her up when she'd called him, asking, on the verge of tears, ifEdward had decided to leave her again, this time without his family.

"Not necessary." She took a deep breath, and Edward smiled. He liked the sound. "He knows something happened to you, but I do have a curfew, you know."

"Yes, Charlie likes to remind me," he sighed, and saw the side of Carlisle's lips turning up in his peripheral vision. Guilt fumed like an exhaust pipe in the back of his head. For having doubted her loyalty to her father, her care for him. "Bella, you should–" he began, but the cell phone fell silent at last, robbing his piece of advice of any value.

"Dang," she whispered.

"Not to worry, Bella," Carlisle soothed. "We'll stop by our house for a change of clothes and then take you home and explain what happened."

Edward wandered into his sire's mind to figure out if the piece that was missing out in his speech had remained there, but actually Carlisle's thoughts were drifting over another – more bothersome – matter and sprinkling dust and gravel over the fact that Charlie couldn't really _know _what happened.

"Of course," Edward added, "for Charlie's sake, we'll leave out the most bizarre details."

And then he remembered: Bella had mentioned that her father was aware of an occurrence involving his unofficial (_vexing, like an itch_) son-in-law. The first option shone brighter – an accident, one of those human errors no one could be faulted for. Although they _could_ describe the actual incident with loose, impressionistic flicks, paint it to him in blurry watercolors, but was it worth it? What was the point of making Jacob seem like… a bully? And the two of them – they were like uncle and nephew.

A disturbing undulation of guilt settled in Edward's head. In less than two months, they would be husband and wife, and both Bella and Jacob would be robbed of the still pulsating chance to be together, as… lovers. And then she'd lose her humanity, her life, the most precious of all things, and they'd see the chance to be together as friends disappear. Jacob would lose a lot. Charlie's pride and trust could at least remain intact.

So Edward said, "In fact, a made-up story would be better."

"Maybe that you were out hiking in the woods and fell," Bella suggested. Her cell phone stirred awake with a long whiz. It lit up in a vivid imitation of a beacon, and there was light on the windows and the ceiling and the leather, blinking eerily. This time she moved the device to her ear. "Dad…"

"_Bells, I don't care if Edward fell into a well. Tell me where you are and I'll pick you up._"

"Actually, Dad–" She faltered, lost in all the possible excuses that she could give him, but Charlie would mistake it for an awkward pause in her speech. It was so typically human, so common, and it dulled them down to comical creatures moving clumsily through life like cockroaches. It seemed so for vampire senses. And too often Edward felt like a hermit when he was with his family, because amidst all the voices in his head and his own mental travels encountering the right words was a lot more difficult. "We took longer than we'd expected, because we still had to search for him. He fell down a hill, and it was dark and…" Bella's imagination expired, and she trailed off, and silence reigned.

The car's headlights drew a heart on the tar road, and the falling rain incandesced like a million lightening bulbs in front of them. Edward breathed in the fine tension in the air – he had come to appreciate the simple hesitancy of human movements, and thought there was some grace in it. Because humans were naturally inclined to be afraid or uncertain. Even about the simplest things.

After all they always had something to lose, and that was wonderful.

"_I see,_" Charlie grunted, sounding almost… vexed. But then he must have regained hold of his own sensibility, and he asked, with a voice toned down by concern, "_Is he alright?_"

"He… broke his leg. Listen," she said, hastening her words, "Carlisle will take me home soon. I'll see you then."

She dispatched him just like that, and his weak "_See ya_" died with the call. Edward's stomach filled with laughter and endearment, because this was one of those flaws that he could very easily bear, common to a great multitude of people. Bella didn't enjoy keeping up mundane conversations for more than short periods of time. Charlie was much the same, so he probably didn't mind.

The sleek Mercedes cut into a downward road, the tires turned under it with a screech, inaudible to human ears, and next to him Carlisle brooded.

Edward frowned, hit by second-hand worry. Carlisle's mind was occupied by the thought that his family, namely Rosalie and (remarkably) Esme, wouldn't be too happy about one of them being attacked when there was a godforsaken document offering them just the reasonable amount of immunity. It made Edward freeze – it hadn't even occurred to him, or perhaps he hadn't yet processed the fact that _Jacob had broken his leg._

And now he had the urge to fade into the seat and was shrinking into it already. Now it dawned on him that Jacob's hate was not just a slight needle in his side, or even something born simply out of the juvenile need to taunt someone he deemed a _competitor_. Up until now Edward had bared himself to the insults, the provocative thoughts, the stress put on the idea that Jacob had what Edward didn't have and could give what Edward couldn't _ever _give, the relentless accusations that Edward couldn't deny, so– He never defended himself, and very rarely did he retaliate, and it was never with as much hostility as he was used to receiving from Jacob.

Because it was all true, after all. Edward was a freak, and his gift was more of a curse to him and an inconvenience to others than anything else. He _was _a monster, with the capacity to hurt and destroy implanted in his anatomy and the sum of his victims almost visible in his yellowed eyes. And he _had _exposed Bella to pain and fear, and he'd fled in and out of her life like a hurricane, made a mess, caused her to drown, attracted her to the headquarters of his odious world by trying to put an end to his existence, smothered her with his protectiveness, been either too much or too little and never, ever _right._

And, yes, Bella could do so much better.

Thinking of it all like this, Edward wondered why Jacob hadn't outright ripped his head off.

But this wasn't about him – the question was to what lengths Jacob was willing to go to demonstrate his hatred.

"It'll be fine," he said lowly enough that only Carlisle would hear. His lips barely moved. "This has nothing to do with them."

But Carlisle had gathered as much, and this was a useless attempt to ward off his worries. And Edward's implication that his family shouldn't be concerned about one of their members blew a windstorm into his usually calm mind. He boarded on the audacity to send a sarcastic remark into his son's head, and it threw Edward off guard, because–

_Edward, you mean as much to us as Bella does._

The pointedness of the thought, the half-joking and half-serious tone behind it, poked at his conscious, and he winced. He understood – he couldn't ask so much of his family. He'd lived with Carlisle for decades, fit into his bare reality like an eternal protégé when he was all by himself, hopeless amidst the dry vastness of his existence. His vague care for Bella would never come near his affection for Edward. Or any of his adopted children, for that matter.

"We will handle the situation as best as we possibly can," Carlisle murmured, and it was all he could say right then. No plans had begun to form in his mind, and when they parked in front of their white house, silent and coming up short, the amber light pouring from the windows made Edward feel as if he was encased in darkness. The house had gained the aspect of a dismal tavern, and Rosalie's voice wafted out of it like a cold gust of air.

"Great," she said, and Edward could hear her flipping through a magazine. "They brought the _human_."

Jasper's thoughts were turned to all that he was feeling second-handedly, and immediately his mind became simultaneously defensive and attentive.

"Something's wrong," he muttered.

Edward didn't want to prolong the wait, or pretend that this was that big of a matter. He understood Carlisle's reasons for being worried – truly, he did –, but all of it seemed to morph into one of those petty human issues that could be solved with one or two of conversations and short-term pain. Vampires knew all too well that only a handful of things were actually permanent.

One of them being the absence of a future to look forward to, which might as well be called vampirism.

He was reminded too late and severely that his leg was an absolute mess when he tried to step out of the car. The pain in his knee, which until then had been nodding off, awakened with an aggressive sort of fierceness bursting through its limits, and just like that it became unbearable.

He doubled over with a hiss, his fingers tight around the leather of his seat, and Carlisle was suddenly in front of him, his eyes appearing so much like beacons in the dark, guiding him, offering the promise of shelter, that Edward didn't want to go to Charlie's house at all. He wanted to stay here, surrounded by people who didn't point their fingers at him every time he spoke or moved.

But he'd made the mess – obviously there had to be consequences.

"Hold on to my hand," Carlisle said, his fingers extended invitingly, but Edward didn't want to hurt him.

"It's alright," he grounded out. "It'll go away soon."

"What's going on?" Emmett asked after the soles of his sneakers had punched through a couple of rocks on the ground and milled the gravel underneath. He'd jumped off the second floor as soon as the family began to form a half-moon around their leader's car. "_Dude_," he drawled with a laugh that made the dimples on his cheeks show. "Your girlfriend is rubbing off on you. Badly."

Edward stared down at his leg, held in place by a plaster cast that restrained it completely, from his foot to his thigh, and he didn't know how to feel about it. He couldn't protect Bella now, but then again – maybe, seeing this, she would realize that he couldn't do all the work.

"You smell like _mutt,_" Alice stated, her soprano voice thickened by the wary thoughts boiling in her mind. Ochre-tinted eyes switched their attention to the human amongst them, and as they did so a somber shadow passed over them.

_I swear, if he got hurt because of _them…

"Let's go," Edward said, interrupting his sister's train of thought. "We have to get Bella home."

Carlisle slipped his arm under his and held him by the waist, bringing the both of them up. Jasper joined them silently, and felt his brother's gratitude like a warm breeze running through his chest. The others followed them into the house both physically and mentally, struck by their own conjectures, and behind them Bella's heart beat with the force and rhythm of the beak of a woodpecker. Edward hoped that Alice's accusing look wouldn't make her think that any of this was her fault when she found out.

Of course that had to be more difficult now. Edward was already sitting in his bedroom, after Carlisle and Jasper had nearly carried him upstairs, when he heard her voice filtering through the hinges of the door, brought from below with a chilling echo:

"What did you _do_?"

His shoulders slumped in defeat, and Jasper looked at him and laughed, even if the counters of his mind still bore spikes, strategies to use in order to defend his family were anything to come about. He handed him a pair of training sweats, and the damp and mussed clothes that had lazed heavily and uncomfortably on top of his skin were replaced with cotton, and Edward could just _wallow _in it.

(Could cover himself up with it and never, ever come out.)

"Alice, I don't know what you mean," Bella replied, and her pulse quickened with the same kind of fear that was weakening her voice. Edward cursed his situation then – the first time he did it since his knee had been crushed. A relentless frustration invaded his mind. It was like someone was pushing him with all their might and he simply wouldn't _budge. _He had the immense urge to rush downstairs and hold her, reassure her: none of this was her fault at all; everything was going to _be alright_; and Alice was just scared, too.

He could add that she didn't mean anything by it, but lying was next on the list of things he was tired of doing.

"Do tell me if it was an accident and I'm being unfair, Bella."

"Alice, cut it out," Edward said lowly, almost angrily, because she was just stepping onto a mined area. Eventually she would find out what'd happened and be heavily sorry for her reaction, and Bella would be taking a hit from someone she'd grown close to, and obviously that would hurtboth of them. "Bella wasn't involved in any of this. She doesn't even know what happened yet."

Framed by the figures of his father and brother, Edward glared down at her from the top of the stairs, because Bella had her arms wrapped around herself, her legs gone tense beneath her tight jeans, and she was evidently intimidated by _this _Alice – the one who had suffered along with him, silent amidst the darkness of her friend's future (which usually meant _death_), whenever she went to the reservation. But – _regardless of that_, Edward thought, _she is here now and she's not to blame._

Anyway, Carlisle, who brought him into the living room with Jasper's unnecessary (yet appreciated) help, had begun to rummage through the possible ways in which he could tell his family the truth, and all too quickly Alice received a good enough version of the facts like a light slap in the face. She regretted having implied that Bella had been responsible for what'd befallen him, but she was – not surprisingly – somewhat relieved of a certain weight in her conscious.

Because, for her, Bella was to blame for something else. And though Edward hoped his sister didn't feel that way, he couldn't begin to convince her otherwise.

His arguments were not very solid.

"I-I don't," Bella stressed, agitated, curved in on herself, and Edward touched the tips of his fingers to her elbow. "I swear, Alice."

"She knows, Bella," he murmured next to her, and swiped gently the polyester of her raincoat. "She's seen Carlisle telling them about it."

He sent Alice a warning look from where he was sitting, almost _small _against the vast whiteness of the couch, at least in his family's eyes. The grey hoodie opened loosely around his neck, and beneath that a pair of sharp collarbones was peeking out, and there was a hint of foreign fragility in their new vision of him. Edward himself felt different, less of a predator and more of a prey – anxiety was common to both positions, but abnormally this was a much more bearable sort of fear. His leg still ached terribly above the pillows and the pulled-out extension of the sofa, and he was heavily aware that he couldn't even walk without some sort of support: Jacob could come and finish him for good. He'd be a pile of debris before he even had the chance to stand up.

But somehow, for some reason, this was a much more bearable kind of fear.

"I'm sorry," Alice said, complying with her brother's half-plea. He'd given her _the _look, the kind that opened no room for discussion, but clearly the apology was mostly empty. Alice was moving through the ample alleys between the furniture of the living room with a sort of contained grace, her usual excitement toned down by the graveness of the situation, and it was as if the incident had never happened at all.

Odd – petulancy had the potential to fit her elfin frame so much better, and yet it was flippancy that characterized her in circumstances like these, signalized her. There was no comparison between her and Rosalie. Or Bella, for that matter.

Alice didn't throw tantrums. Hell – she didn't even _keep _them. In her mind, life was a series of moments of dismissive compliance, because the present was already past and there was a future to take care of.

But, of course, she had her reservations – one of them being directly connected to Bella's attraction to _the mutt._

Bella clearly didn't notice the lack of feeling in her apology, however, because she settled into her previous state of guiltlessness, and her heartbeat slowed to its usual steady pace.

Edward turned his head to her, saw her under the light in the ceiling looking so much healthier, with a cream glow to her skin, and thought she was utterly beautiful.

"Will _somebody _tell us what's going on?" Rosalie asked, just when he thought she'd been strangely quiet since he'd arrived.

"Edward stepped onto Quileute territory," Carlisle answered, much too promptly for the doubts that plagued his brain, like _that _had been the reason why he'd been attacked.

Everyone's gaze slid to his lean figure, and he was somehow making himself slighter, because their minds were overridden by the thought that he had broken the treaty – that he had _finally _done it, probably in a panicked frenzy to protect Bella from the sharp possibility of being mauled by a volatile wolf –, and now the family would have to deal with yet another threat.

Next to him Bella's ribcage expanded with the sharp breath she took, and the scent of ripe fruit strengthened as her blood pumped into the artery in her neck and painted her cheeks red.

"You _know _you can't cross the border," she whispered through gritted teeth, and Edward's chest throbbed.

With the feeling that he was being wrongly accused.

He hadn't _fucked up _– not this time. All the wolves had been too distracted by the chase to truly mind his presence, and Sam _was _their leader. He called the shots. Certainly bickering and fighting could emerge from his decision, but they were naturally inclined to follow his orders, even reluctantly. And none of this had happened because of their basic politics, so Carlisle could at least let _him _speak if his explanation could only create more of a ruckus.

"Sam Uley told me I could," he said quietly, and snapped his gaze up, pierced Carlisle's eyes with it. "I was running nearby when I heard his pack. They were having some difficulty chasing a rogue newborn, and I considered it appropriate to _suggest_ that I help. I _asked._" He spoke slowly, each word separated from the others due to its own importance, and he stressed the ones that could perhaps give Carlisle a hint of what had actually taken place.

All this time Carlisle had been wavering, vacillating between the idea that his son had been hurt unjustly, cruelly, and the inkling that Edward had brought it upon himself. He was all ready to forgive him, of course, like he always did, but this time he could do away with his compassionate posture, because Edward hadn't done anything _wrong._ Carlisle's suspicions shook him up, pressed on his wild emotions with a little too much force, and frustration seeped quickly into his throat along with his unfed venom.

"Edward…" Jasper watered down the welling fire inside him with a wave of calm. "If Sam allowed you to step onto their lands, why did they attack you?"

He stilled, ensnared between the two blunt edges of a familiar dilemma – to lie or not to lie. Before Carlisle had dropped the wrong grenade, Edward had honestly thought that his family would accuse the pack of disregarding the treaty by putting a Cullen in danger, but the arrows had pointed to him, so perhaps if he did tell them the truth Jacob wouldn't get _all _the blame. He'd share it with Edward.

But anyway, it wasn't as if they would rage against Jacob for breaking his leg out of particular reasons. This had been going on for a while now, and in the end it only involved two people and a monster.

He figured that his hesitation derived from the fear of what Bella would think once she found out that this'd been her best friend's work.

She was staring at him so expectantly, her melted brown eyes searching for an answer, and he opened his mouth to speak – but he c_ouldn't._

"Jacob admitted that it was him," Carlisle said, and Edward smacked his lips together in a way that Emmett found rather laughable.

"W-what?" Bella spluttered, and her chestnut hair was falling like a leisured brook over the counters of a face that pleaded with him to deny it, and he wished suddenly that Carlisle had remained quiet, at least in front of her, and it would spare her from the feeling of betrayal that was beaming off the thin layer of tears that covered her eyes.

She didn't _have _to go through this again – to be faced with another mistake made by either of the men she loved. To think that her best friend had gone out of his way to hurt somebody she cared about, breaking her trust in the meantime.

But he could always…

"He was just doing his duty, Bella," he lied. It almost _burned _him. He'd do anything for her to be happy, but the lie wore him down, actually, because he wanted to be better for her. Kinder and truer – but apparently the two couldn't converge. And, besides, regardless of his secret care for Jacob's well-being (which, surprisingly enough, only Charlie had noticed), the truth was that he _had _acted out of malice.

If he really had just been doing his duty, he wouldn't have purposefully shown him a vision of Bella in Sam's arms after Edward had left her in the woods. He wouldn't have added her self-hugs, her blank expression, the circles under her eyes. The kiss. The conversation when she'd visited him after he'd been injured.

"_It would have been effortless for us – comfortable, easy as breathing. I was the natural path your life would have taken… If the world was the way it was supposed to be, if there were no monsters and no magic…"_

Bella's agreeing eyes.

And another piece of Edward had withered away, when he heard that, seen that, and he had faltered, unconsciously given Jacob the chance he needed to twist his leg around with his jaws as if it was a chew toy.

"And it all happened very fast," he went on, despite the ache in his head and his heart and his leg, because she was hurting and he had to do _something _about it. "Jacob was probably too distracted by the chase to really mind Sam—"

"He's lying," Jasper interrupted, and the room seemed to shuffle with his inner agitation, his own emotions molding the others'. Edward was enveloped in a sort of tired anger that belonged solely to his brother, and he understood – Jasper was tired.

He was tired of feeling Edward's misery. Tired of seeing Alice so frustrated.

Tired of watching Bella ramble angrily in the face of Jacob's mental attacks against his brother and then hypocritically running to the reservation, murmuring amens.

His sense of fairness was red and dry, like an itchy, irritated patch of skin.

"Edward, please tell us the truth," Carlisle urged, sitting on the opposite sofa, his hands woven in front of him. "Why did Jacob do this to you?"

He could swear they were doing it on purpose. Their minds swam to the most obvious of explanations, and they didn't even need to hear another word – his family _knew _that Jacob had attacked him out of spite. And yet they seemed to be trying to yank the whole story out of him, hear, syllable by syllable, how he had been distracted by the same thoughts, the same images, that had plagued him since he'd come back from Italy.

Because Carlisle didn't want to see a repetition of this experience in the future – to have to listen to his son whimper in agony and watch his face dissolve into a puddle reflecting another painful moment in his life. Because when he had leaned over him, just after fixing his leg, seeing him so devoid of defenses, Carlisle had remembered the day when he'd bent just like that over the feeble body of a certain Edward Masen and whispered to him that his mother had passed away.

And seen his ghostly face mirrored in a set of brimming green eyes.

And realized that, even so close to death, the boy still found strength to hurt. To care.

To live.

"We need to take Bella home," Edward reminded him, and at first it was simply an attempt to evade their questions, but then the worried wrinkles around Charlie's eyes made an appearance in his mind. Of course – he'd indulged in the usual safety of his own home, where, amongst the familiar thoughts of his family and the darkness of the woods, he was most comfortable. Where he didn't have to be faced with the truth and listen to Charlie think that his daughter could do so much better.

And meanwhile the man fretted and so did Bella, and all of this because he had to be so damn self-serving and cowardly.

"No, Edward." Carlisle stood up, and wiped a thin thread of fiberglass off the lapel of his jacket. "I'm calling Charlie and asking him to come pick Bella up. You're in no state to move around right now."

"But, Carlisle—"

"That's final."

It was one of those very rare times when Carlisle affirmed himself as the leader of the house, the patriarch, and Edward was so stunned he couldn't so much as rebel for Bella's sake. Suddenly his sire's understanding of the situation cleared out, his doubts washed away, and Jacob's reasons to hurt his son pulled and stretched his immeasurable patience until it almost tore open.

Edward hadn't imagined it to turn out like this. He'd assumed it'd be much easier.

"This is my fault," Bella whispered, and _this _was it – what Edward had been most afraid of.

Apart from Emmett's too serious wish to bash Jacob's skull in.

Rosalie scoffed. "Just what we needed – more of the human's half-assed guilt."

Edward had his fingers tangled in the brown curls that spilled calmly onto Bella's back, the tips pressing ever so delicately against her spine, and he'd been about to convince her otherwise, when his sister had snapped. Bella drew in a quiet breath upon the words, and Edward's protectiveness centered on her for the millionth time.

"Rosalie," he said with a rumble so low that only a vampire would be able to hear it.

His sister let her high-heeled shoe dangle like a fragile branch, and her blasé posture, the crossed legs and the hand resting on the TV remote, fizzled suddenly with impatience.

"What?" she continued, relentless as ever, with a femme fatale-ish tilt of her perfect head. "It's true. You picked a sloppy martyr, _brother. _Next time you watch her sleep, notice how _peacefully _she does it."

"Rosalie, that's enough," Esme intervened. "Bella is not to blame for this."

_Thank you, Esme, _Edward thought with a sigh. Amidst Alice's forward accusations, Jasper's wearying memories, Carlisle's refusal to take Bella home, Rosalie's cross comments – amidst all of this, Esme's calming presence was a blessing.

Except she wasn't all that calm, but, God, at least she chose more opportune moments to speak her mind.

"Don't worry, Esme. I'm sure that, deep down, Bella knows that."

"Will you shut up?" Edward hissed, driven out of his self-control by the smell of salt nailed to Bella's glistening eyes and the sound of her lungs convulsing in a slight sob. And all of him was a pool of melted butter then, guttering under the sight of her like that, pained and exposed. "Could you please give us a moment?" he pleaded, softer now. They'd still hear them, of course, but he thought that Bella, self-conscious as she was, would appreciate the sense of privacy.

"Come wrestle with me, man." Emmett clapped Jasper on the shoulder, and the two flitted to the back of the house through the French windows. "I need to loosen the hell up. Hey – no cheating, yeah?"

Rosalie was nearly dragged out of the living room, with Alice taking her by the elbow and ranting about a _formidable_ summer collection. Esme followed them. Edward heard Carlisle on the phone with Charlie in the floor above.

"Bella, love," he said gently, and shifted slightly to better look at her. As he did so his knee sibilated, lunted a crippling pain, and he pulled on all his reigns so as not to groan in front of her. He ghosted his fingers over the rounded trace of her cheekbone. "Please look at me," he begged, and she did. Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth, and Edward read the nervousness on the whiteness around them, from where her blood had dispersed. "Don't mind Rosalie, alright? And you're not responsible for this at all."

All of her chest shuddered upon a tentative inhale, and Edward's shoulders dropped, because this'd been a difficult evening for her, too, and, Christ, perhaps he'd also been harsh with her when she'd only meant to give him some of her warmth while Carlisle fixed him. He wove his fingers through the softness of the hair that curved around the back of her ear in a torturous serpentine, and wished Charlie would come soon. He wouldn't be able to be with her, for her, during the rest of the night, but he hoped that at least she would be able to sleep some of this away.

"If Jacob wasn't in love with me, he wouldn't have—"

"Bella," he stopped her then, his venom bristling hotly against the underside of his skin. And now, seeing the domino effect that'd burst out of Jacob's actions, he fulminated. "Hurting someone intentionally is not a demonstration of love," he said, and hoped the seriousness in his gaze could stamp just this one sentence onto her memory. "It's a demonstration of hate."

"W-what're you trying to get at?" Bella stammered, and a dangerous crimson crawled up her thudding neck. Her eyes narrowed in anger. "Are you saying that Jacob hates me? Edward, I know he broke your leg, but that's a really dirty move!"

Upstairs Rosalie mumbled, "Someone get this creature's head out of her rear."

"No, Bella," he sighed, not even angry at Rosalie. Or anyone, for that matter. "I'm saying that Jacob hates _me_."

_And I can't blame him, _he added in his head.

"Oh," Bella whispered, and an ashamed magenta spread evenly across her cheeks. For her there was a tense silence after that, and for him there was simply the absence of a conversation between them making more noise than the thoughts in his head.

"Anyway," he said, once he'd seen her embarrassment fade to a sweet pale pink and her attention return, "I could've at least thought about the possibility of the treaty holding more importance than Sam's word."

"So…" Bella's eyes had hope popping out of its depths, and inwardly Edward winced, because he knew what was coming and he hated to disappoint her. "Was Jacob really just acting according to the treaty?"

Perhaps, like Jasper, he was feeling his sense of fairness dry up uncomfortably, because he could repeat his previous lie right now and, despite the obvious falsity of it, she was likely to accept it. And Jacob would _get away _with it.

"Rather conveniently, Bella, wouldn't you say?" he retorted, and his revolt could almost be felt. Groped.

Why did he do this anyway? She wasn't a child – in the end, she was actually older than him, her brain having continued to develop past the seventeen-year-old status that _his _brain would forever be stuck at. He didn't have to shield her from every ugly truth out there.

And as far as he knew, Jacob was also an apologist of that idea.

_So there._

"He took advantage of the situation? Is that it?"

Edward had his fingers flee through the wild mane on top of his head, and decided to go along with it. She appeared to be sufficiently disappointed – not so much that she would cut off all contact with Jacob, but enough to recognize that her best friend had his faults. And, honestly, Edward saw no harm in that – he was infinitely more flawed than the both of them together anyway.

And he was still compelled, as much as he rationalized it and remembered Bella's maturity and strength, not to let all the facts slip out. There was no need to feed the feeling that she'd been betrayed, or make it seem as if this wouldn't have happened if Jacob was not in love with her.

He guessed that this was what Rosalie meant. Bella believed in fate, and she attributed the cone of shame to those who naturally fumbled blind over its path when shit happened, like chess pieces moved by a metaphysical hand – if _I hadn't come to Forks; _if _I hadn't jumped off the cliff_; if _I hadn't become the subject to Jacob's affection _–, getting censured for what was beyond their control, and so, in the end of things, nobody was actually guilty of anything.

Edward could see how that made things easier, but he couldn't imagine himself doing that. Not out of conceitedness, but…

Fate had taken his friends and family, so it was expectedly difficult for him to trust it. He'd rather side with deliberation, if only to counter or fight against fate – _if he _chose_ to leave, Bella would have a much higher chance of having a fulfilling life._ Perhaps that made things easier, too, in a way…

"Edward?" Bella said expectantly.

Expectancy – that's what made _his _belief more comforting. But, anyway, wasn't that the purpose of beliefs? To comfort people?

"You're doing the statue thing again. Say something. Please."

He was – his hand was still tangled in his hair. Edward blinked, snapped back to reality.

"Yes, I suppose he did," he said at last.

Bella sat back against the leather cushion, pensive, and for the thousandth time Edward wished he could read her mind. She was an open book, indeed, and he could leaf through it with reasonable ease, but there were moments like these, when there wasn't a tone of voice to decode, or a worried wrinkle slashed across her forehead, or a change in her breathing, and he had no idea what she could possibly be thinking. And there he went – hoping. Hoping she was alright, within the circumstances.

"Why did you do it, though?" she asked suddenly. "Why did you try to help them?"

"Bella," he started, and took a preparatory breath. Just one of the habits he'd picked from her. "Did Jacob tell you what his pack would do after…the change?"

"The truce will be over. I know," she replied immediately, and he heard her blood running faster through her veins in what he assumed to be a sudden spurt of irritation. She'd probably like to avoid a conversation in which once again he'd try to dissuade her from becoming like him. Immortal. Horrifyingly unchangeable.

But she had to hear this. As much as he disliked Rosalie, the reason why one of her comments had sparked no wrathful fire in him was because he did, sadly, quietly, agree with her. Lately Bella had been disregarding others in her relentless quest for immortality, and she needed to know that her decision didn't affect just her.

"That's right. There might be a war."

"Not if we move first," Bella countered. "What will they do? Chase us across the country?"

He was perfectly aware of how well they could avoid it. But the mere idea was perturbing – that any of the wolves (people, at the end of the day) could be destroyed before they so much as _lived._ And, in addition, there were other disquieting consequences that could arise from Bella's decision.

"I wouldn't put it past them, actually, but…" Edward saw her cross her arms over her chest in a manner that he found almost…condescending. He frowned. "They might, I think, do worse than that – reveal our secret."

"Yes," she huffed, flushed and exasperated, "but who will believe them? And even if they do, by that time we'll be living far away from here."

_Until the Volturi find out and literally rip our heads off._

"Yes, but Bella," he insisted, because there was _more _and she had to know about it. "With the truce over, we won't be allowed to come back to Forks. Ever."

He expected her to slow down, think it through, consider that – there weren't very many places where they could inhabit, where they could go out and attend classes like normal people. And they'd never – they'd never share another moment in the meadow. Edward wasn't one to give value to spots or objects, but the meadow was… It was a special place. It wasn't what all of this was about, of course, and he'd get over it eventually, but he'd be saddened by the impossibility of visiting it again nonetheless.

But apparently Bella didn't much care.

"That's it? You'd give up eternity with me just for a chance to come back to Forks?"

"No, Bella, listen," he sighed, and raked a hand through his hair. "You asked me why I decided to help Sam. I'm trying to explain it to you." _Damnit, _he added mentally. "There's a way we don't even have to leave the town at all. I mean, I don't think it'd be an alliance per se… It would be… Look, like the mob— No. It'd be a sort of implicit contract based on fairness, if you will. We help them, and they bend the rules somewhat. Do you understand now?"

She fell silent then, pondering his words. Rosalie had started a bout of insults that streamed right into her brother's head, accusing him of sheer stupidity. She had no faith in _that pack of mongrels_ whatsoever, and thought they would never, _ever _get past their own bigotry.

She'd be surprised to know that their leader had been willing to go along with it, for everyone's sake.

But, really, unsurprisingly, Rosalie was more annoyed at the idea of having to help them. And afraid that deep down they'd taken advantage of her brother's amicability.

_It's high time Carlisle drops the diplomatic posture and allows me or Jasper to give them a good scare, so they will back the _hell off_._

Edward had done well in giving Sam that warning. He thought that, apart from the moral need to do whatever was in his power to put him out of harm's way, it was also a sort of retribution for his willingness to take him home and not just leave him lying on the other side of the border, as well as his immense care and sense of responsibility over the pack.

Apropos – Seth had sounded upset. Edward wondered if he was better now. Kind minds like his tended to harden to protect themselves from the injustices and uncalled-for violence around them, and he'd hate for that to happen, because Seth was a good kid. He truly was.

The unoiled brakes of Charlie's cruiser whined painfully outside, and Bella's teeth pressed down on her lower lip.

"You know, I think Charlie should know," she whispered. "You can make up a story right now. And then he'll stop pestering me and trying to practically push me into Jacob's arms."

At his side, a pale hand curled anxiously into a rock-like fist. He was afraid of a hindering nothing that tied up his tongue, without offering any clue regarding his reluctance to speak the truth. Maybe he was a compulsive liar, after all. Although Bella hadn't mentioned lying, actually, so perhaps he simply—

He didn't want anyone's sympathy. He didn't deserve it. That was it.

"Hello, Alice," Charlie greeted with an uncharacteristic kind of warmth, after ringing the doorbell and being faced with the tiny pixie. Edward didn't think it strange that he'd grown fond of her, after Alice's clear demonstration of her potential as a friend.

Besides, Alice was loveable. Edward truly thought so – he had taken to her irreversibly right after he'd met her. Charlie had obviously done the same.

"My brother looks like a mummy," she chirped to him as she led him into the living room. "An unfinished mummy. I can't wait to start drawing on his cast!"

Carlisle's spectral figure shimmered in his peripheral vision, and Alice's bubbling seemed suddenly more of a way to filter out the tension that still lingered there, so as not to make Bella's father uncomfortable. Still, Charlie's moustache lifted on the side, and all of it was a meek wave, because Edward was a messy sight, the circles under his eyes bearing the sickly aspect of recent hematomas, and almost torturously a trace of concern leaked out of his wary brown eyes.

"How're you doing, kiddo?" he asked, and Edward's chest shrunk under this form of address and the inconceivably warming condescendence that dripped from it. It was almost… overwhelming, but of course Charlie couldn't possibly know that he would _never _be worthy of the nicety – that, indeed, he could be worse than someone who'd made a wreck out of his daughter.

_Worse than _that.

Sometimes, he thought about Charlie, at his total unawareness of the kind of world he'd introduced his only child to, and knowing that he couldn't leave again – he wished silently that he could immerse himself in absolute numbness.

"I'm okay now," he replied with a faint smile. For the sake of appearances he added, "Carlisle has already given me some painkillers."

"Bells told me you fell down a hill." Charlie rubbed the side of his face as if the whole fictional experience was taking a toll on him, too, joined inevitably with the memory of Jacob's supposed motorbike accident. Only weeks apart from this – Bella's father regarded only for a few seconds the probability of Edward having provoked it, led by an unknown yearning for his daughter's attention. But he stopped right there.

Out of the two he very much preferred Jacob, for reasons cited and repeated a dozen times, but he wasn't blind. Jacob had the tendency to play games deeply ingrained in him, spoke very often with a competitive choice of words. A lot of boys his age did.

Edward was different. Visibly jaded. Charlie guessed that was how many foster kids passed through. By letting go of most of the greenness in them.

"Yes," Alice tweeted, printing a vision she had of the Louvre onto the plaster on his ankle with a pink marker. "The wind blew and, oops, there he went, falling down the hill. Absolutely by accident."

The pointedness of her comment prickled the blurry edges of Charlie's mind. Entered it with some difficulty. Alice's sarcasm altered somewhat his image of her and welded her into a more mature, profound version of the perky girl he'd come to know, and suddenly he, too, became conscious of a sort of forced relaxedness lying over all of the three Cullens.

"Pink," Edward said, in an attempt to discharge the mood of its heaviness. "Of course."

"Excuse me, color-blind person," Alice retorted, fusing her tentative playfulness with his, while she gave up on hoping that he'd decide to tell Charlie a close enough version of the truth. "This is salmon."

Just a display of their theatrical abilities. Some humans found it _unmanly, _having a more than basic knowledge about the universe of colors and textures and whatnot, something that Edward had always seen as a cheap promotion of a regress in culture for the sake of indolent male egos.

"It doesn't go with my hair," he complained jokily.

Charlie's experience of the exchange was a strange one. He liked Alice and disliked Edward and seeing them break the stereotype of siblings as enemies and jesting fraternally between them instead made him feel odd. And equally aware of the protective bite to her previous words, symmetrically compatible with Carlisle's stance at the bottom of the stairs.

"Chief Swan." He diverted Charlie's attention in less than a second, because his presence was something unearthly, an example of utility. Carlisle was a bit of an idol to the town folks, not as much for his willingness to take someone else's children in as for his prestige as a doctor.

And too often the kids were eclipsed by his reputation – although apparently that was about to change.

Esme came to join him, bare of her usual warmth and welcoming softness, and they weren't cardboard figures anymore.

They were parents.

"My husband and I would like to have a word with you," she said, and her smile was purposefully strained. "In private. I'm afraid we've held off this conversation for too long."


	4. External Perspective

**A.N.: Your reviews and follows and faves warm me up, each one of them. Thank you, and I hope you all enjoy this chapter!**

**()**

"I hope you find a way to be yourself someday, in weakness or in strength. Change can be amazing."

–The Neighbourhood, _Honest_

**()**

Chief Swan shuffled across the rich color that matted the floor of Dr. Cullen's office. The modernity of most of the house dispersed into a waft of molt-scented air that waddled through the wooden shelves and stuck to the knowledge that sat on them, clinging to an infinity of red spines and letters wounded with gold threads. Each book was a literate with impressive studies staring at him sideways, above the frames of its glasses, with an air of solemn rejection, and amidst this surplus of dusty education Charlie felt like an intruder.

"Please," Dr. Cullen said, shaping the weight of his own office's ostentatiousness into an insignificant detail and Charlie's presence into a necessary means to an end. They were here to discuss something _important. _"Take a seat."

His pale hand waved warmly to the padded chair across his ornate desk, and Charlie made a slow exercise of his rusted joints, sitting down with his habitual wariness, as if the blonde man on the other side of the table was the school director and he'd been called into his burrow in regard to an unpleasant incident involving his daughter. Esme Cullen was standing beside her husband with her arms crossed over the purple silk of her blouse, carrying over her shoulders, like a shawl to keep her warm on a stormy night, an unreadable kind of unease. As if to emphasize her quiet disquiet, a flash of lightning clapped wetly outside, with the sound of two giant hands snapping a tree in two under the discharge of an overcast sky.

"I'm sure you're ready to go home with your daughter… and that we've all tried your patience this evening," Dr. Cullen started, and his words hit jackpot. "I apologize for not having called you myself. Sooner, I mean."

Charlie had one of his usual, awkward grunts stuck in his throat, about to reverberate through his vocal cords, until he remembered that would mean that he _accepted _the apology. And this was Carlisle Cullen he had in front of him, cordial as ever, someone he held in high regard, despite his sudden departure the previous year.

_Was it that long ago?_

"It's alright," he said, settling with that one platitude, only a little better than silence, but in his head, after surpassing a couple of barriers, it was injected with sincerity. Of course he'd been pushed into a state of legitimate worry when he'd entered an empty house and received no answer when he'd called his daughter. Remembering when she'd lost herself in the woods after the break-up, he'd even considered starting a search party, when, in reality, the search party should have been for Edward. And seeing a few uncharacteristic lines marring the pale perfection and strange youthfulness of Carlisle and Esme's faces, Charlie had to take a sharp turn, instead of driving along the usual road he followed, and this bumpy lane shook him up with inevitable roughness.

He'd sort of forgotten that Bella was not the only kid in the world.

"You must be wondering what my wife and I wish to discuss with you. Before anything, I'd like you to know that we wouldn't ask this of you if we didn't think it was of extreme importance, but perhaps after you hear what we have to tell you we'll end up coming to an agreement without difficulty."

_Please cut to the chase. _Charlie's admiration didn't lessen in any way, but he was a man of few words and perhaps Carlisle Cullen used too many. There was obviously something that was tainting the limpid calm of their house, and his understanding of it was clear enough. He was hoping that they _knew _how thankful he was for what they'd done for his daughter when she'd rushed back to Phoenix and hurt herself, and that he was glad to help where he could. So Dr. Cullen was wasting the time that could be spent _getting on with it._

There was only one way he was comfortable solving important matters – quickly.

Plus, the game with the Seahawks was about to start.

"Well, if there's anything I can do…" he muttered. "Don't be afraid to ask."

"Thank you, Chief Swan." Dr. Cullen conceded him a warm smile, with the grace that Charlie lacked, and it catapulted him towards the thought that despite their kids' eventful relationship they still treated each other by their surnames. Or – did they? Maybe they needed to spend time together more often. This level of formality made him somewhat uncomfortable. "Now, since you must have other matters to tend to, I'll get straight to the point." He leaned slightly forward, and the very light brown of his eyes, so odd a color, shed onto the ivory and glass of the stationery on the table a tide of worrisome seriousness. "Your daughter was making a hasty assumption when she said that Edward fell down a hill. In fact, we foundhim at the bottom of a hill in La Push, after Sam Uley called me to inform me of what had happened, for which I am quite grateful."

The mention of his friend's homeplace peeled off the impenetrable resistance that characterized Charlie's mind, and a short circuit passed unbidden through his unawareness, burning it from the inside out, and he was suddenly alert, susceptible to the outside world.

He'd taken notice, long ago, of a certain hostility transpiring through the wrinkles in the embossed leather of Billy's face upon any random reference to the Cullens, and evident signs had stressed the idea that their presence down on the reservation was unwelcome.

"I'm sorry," he said, and his ears sensed like the hissing of a coffee pot the oddness of his next words. "But what was Edward doing in La Push?"

A blunt look fell over Carlisle Cullen's gaze, while he twisted around within tight limits, like an unoiled robot. There was something awfully strange about the way they moved…

"That's a legitimate question, I must admit," he murmured, caught in a regretful stance. The smelted gold of his eyes pelted onto the surface of the table. "I'm afraid I should've encouraged my children to integrate themselves into the community… I suppose this is one of the results. Some people are still wary of us, unfortunately, especially the folks from the Quileute Reservation. You are well aware of that, from what I can see. It's true – we try to avoid those lands. For everyone's sake."

A pale veil of sadness, of quiescent acceptance of this discrimination, dropped onto Dr. Cullen's frame, and Charlie had to imagine what it was like to take in five teenagers and see them being knowingly excluded from a circle where everybody else was allowed entrance. Even if by law that wasn't the case, there was some definite animosity rising off the tribe, directed _only _at the Cullen family – like they were… delinquents. It was the same sort of bias that'd swept over the town when the news of their arrival had spread, staying firm against the proof that they were absolutely harmless.

The whispers and the rumors had nagged at Charlie, until silence settled, and now the Quileute tribe's attitude nettled his mind with equal force.

The Cullens were good people. Resentment aside, regardless of their leaving without foreshadowing and his daughter's consequent withdrawal from the outside world, Charlie really thought that they were good people. Had done more for the town than many of its veterans.

"Edward didn't actually plan on going to La Push," Esme said, picking up the needles needed to knit a piece that'd been left alone momentarily. "He happened to be close by."

Charlie shifted in his seat. He felt like the report should be given a special amount of attention for some reason, but Carlisle retarded the story-telling in order to offer him what he surely considered an important piece of data.

"We take precautions when we go camping. Seeing as there's a lot of wildlife in the area, we decided that our children should be given the preparation needed to ward off any possible threats. And, actually, it proved to be quite useful today, when Edward decided to help Sam Uley and the group of people that were there with him, which included Jacob."

A suspicious tendril of wariness broke through Chief Swan's receptive mind, and he wanted to slow everything down, his impatience shoved aside, but the two of them seemed to have pulverized their clockworks and a torrent of information was coming out at a pace that'd leave him reeling once the machine stopped.

_Ironic._

"We were told that a mountain lion strayed into the area," Esme continued. "When Edward became aware of the danger that Sam and the others were in, he chose to give them a hand. Obviously, he had to put his own safety on the line, but thankfully they managed to chase the animal away without anyone getting hurt."

Dr. Cullen said, "I think you're wondering how Edward got his leg broken." And before Charlie could give any indication that he was right, before he could gather the possible scenarios that could result from a meeting between Edward and Jacob, he dived right into a bothersome justification, a complementation of Charlie's undernourished conjectures. "We're certain that this wasn't a mere accident, Charlie, because Jacob did in fact admit that he's the one responsible for Edward's current situation – rather proudly, I might add."

And so his internal helm initiated a series of stiff movements, moaning and whining like a wounded dog, and it all equaled the state in which one doesn't know what to think. He was very fond of Jacob, treated him like a close relative, had watched him grow up and seen him put Bella back together when the fragments were seemingly nowhere to be found. A pointy beak of competitiveness shot out of him frequently enough, fitting into Charlie's hope that someday he'd be the one that Bella chose for a partner, that he'd replace Edward.

Because for a long time he'd seen the Cullen kid as bad news – even his presence had seemed like a source of trouble, towards which Bella had navigated one too many times since they'd met. And Jacob was familiar. The cheeky attitude didn't make Charlie trust him any less.

But this… This _did. _

"I'm not sure I got this right," he almost stammered out, anesthetized by the voicing of his vague ideas, the articulation of his mild fears with a truth that wasn't so convenient. "Did they get into a fight over Bella or something?"

Any other time the prospect would spark in him the same sort of contained excitement that held him in front of a TV during an important game, and he'd be betting on Jacob, feeling like he was waving a flag in support. But memory flashes of Edward's bruised eyes and plastered leg whipped his brain in a faithful imitation of a leather belt and left red, punishing marks there, strengthening the seriousness in Dr. Cullen's voice. He reprimanded himself: it shouldn't be a game to begin with; his daughter was not a prize; and the boys were not toys.

Today he'd come upon a sight that'd punched him in the gut: after several months, after Jacob's motorbike prank, he'd admitted that Edward was a _decent guy_, more mature in questions of safety, and so he became approvable boyfriend material.

Had he childishly imagined that the kid wasn't breakable?

"I highly doubt that," Esme said; and Charlie looked at her and was intimidated by the tapping of her fingers on her forearm and the light restraints that her soft voice was dragging. "Edward has witnessed enough violence to be repelled by it nowadays. He tries to avoid it at all costs, so I'm sure he'd only resort to it if it was _extremely_ necessary."

The marks itched now. The reference to Edward's past stressed the boy's breakability, and it jaded him, knowing that someone this young had been exposed to something of this sort on such a scale. And at the same time, his wariness augmented. Instantly. He couldn't help it: Bella was his daughter, and people who had been in Edward's place…

They tended to be problematic. His doubts inflated in tempo with the growth of his worry over Bella.

And then deflated. Esme had just assured him that Edward abhorred violence, and Charlie saw a weary sort of maturity in him which embraced the statement entirely. He was doing it again – centering his worries on his daughter only, as if Edward hadn't been the one to go through these things. His parents' presence and clear sternness countered the new notion in black ink.

Edward wasn't a bodyguard, nor should he have to be. He was, amongst many other things that weren't for sale, the subject of someone's concern and protection.

(So, for Christ's sake, what had Jacob _done_?)

"So you're saying that Jacob probably pushed him," he guessed. Alice's sarcasm made a lot more sense then, and it vibrated inside his head, and he felt like he'd been pushed himself, his certainties crumbling and tumbling under Jacob's too poor choice. But the most difficult thing to swallow was the predictability of the act, as if it'd been welling like a great wave far away from him and it was now crashing against the edgy cut-outs of the bottom of a cliff. He could imagine Jacob doing just that – shoving Edward with enough force to send him into a rolling ride down a hill, possibly after an ominous choice of words. A predictable choice of words. The passive-aggressive had suffered too hard a blow for the passive to be maintained.

A game that shouldn't have been a game in the first place had gotten somebody hurt.

"That's the most likely scenario, yes."

Carlisle's nod tore a wound into the weak hope that something else had taken place.

"Well, maybe he didn't mean for this to happen, you know," he tried. "Jacob is very… big. Maybe he just didn't measure his strength."

Carlisle shifted in his seat and the wood underneath creaked with an echo that tracked down Charlie's attempt with the ferocity of a predator. As if his feeble guess matched the implication that they were overreacting. And thinking of it like that – it seemed so. It seemed as if they were barging into a problem that kids their age could normally fix by themselves. But this was Carlisle Cullen, for God's sake. All of him radiated moderation, juxtaposed now with a certain edginess which evoked the thought that there was a limit for every single person on Earth.

"Chief Swan… Normally, when someone causes another person to get hurt, to break their leg, they apologize for it. They don't revel in it," Carlisle said. A modest sort of hardness had chased away the habitual kindness delimitated by his features. "I'm not blind. And besides that, Jacob's justification didn't tend that way. In fact, according to him, Edward is to blame."

Charlie's back straightened, pushing a sour breath of disappointment against the back of the chair. Right – Jacob's side of the story deserved to be heard, too.

"What did he do?" he asked, because surely Edward couldn't be completely guiltless. Even if he didn't adhere to plain and raw aggressiveness… Jacob had probably been provoked, too…

"He made the grave mistake of stepping onto Quileute land with the intention of helping Jacob and his friends," Esme replied, and Charlie thought that a simple "nothing" would've sufficed. "I think I might ground him for putting his safety on the line for someone who will go on bullying him instead of thanking him."

Her sarcasm could as well have been a piece of steel wool scrubbing off his impulsive judgment, and Charlie felt its harshness exude from the unexpectedness of her tone. He had eyes after all – Esme was obviously a very beautiful woman, and there was an unmistakable sweetness to her which posed a startling contrast with the irony of her words.

It meant that, like her husband, she'd been pushed to one of her limits. Charlie tried to put himself in their place and ended up finding that he didn't do it often enough – if Bella had risked her well-being to assist someone and in return they'd made her break leg…

He'd be pretty mad, too.

It'd be useless to ask himself what the hell had been on Jacob's mind. Esme had said "go on" for reasons Charlie had deemed tolerable up until now. The fact that Edward had set foot in La Push wasn't even relevant – that was no excuse to begin with, and it was obviously not the actual reason why Jacob had pushed him down a goddamn hill. Carlisle wasn't blind, and neither was Charlie.

It wasn't questionable anymore – Jacob had gone too far.

"I'm sorry," Charlie sighed, and the weight of Jacob's mistake was back on his shoulders. "You're… you're right. There's no excuse. And, I mean–" A breath saturated with frustration misted the surface of a paperweight that rested on Carlisle's desk. His neck had bent over its border. "Edward has helped him before, and he's helped him today… I don't know if he's done anything, on the other hand…"

"You think you know my son?" Esme interrupted, and the silence that followed roared louder than thunder.

"No, ma'am," Charlie said humbly, and considered himself a moron for a worthy fraction of a minute. He knew some things, actually, and one of them countered the theory that he'd put out into the world in a mumble that cowered under his own disagreement. He didn't think Edward had wronged Jacob. Not really.

He seemed… too jaded. He'd seen things that'd jade anyone. But Charlie had become used to this – judging the kid, for some reason or another. Too many things served. If it wasn't his lack of sociability, it'd be the expensiveness of his belongings. Or his Ivy League grades. Or a general perfection which bugged Charlie, because he didn't believe in it. (As if Edward _had _to be perfect.) Mostly it was his influence in Bella's life. Especially that.

"You know," Esme said in an almost-whisper that slipped into his ear like a ghost's tortured exhale. The frost in her eyes sparkled now in the sports where it'd fragilely cracked. "Sometimes, when people don't love themselves but love others, they think it's best to push them away." She held her own voice and the moment in a grip large enough to leave fingerprints on Charlie's memory. And at first it also brushed against the father in him, and indignation bled through his thoughts – was she making excuses for him? Did she have any idea what Bella had gone through because of his leaving? What it was like to stand by without knowing how to help?

"Listen, if you're referring to Edward and Bella–" He stopped there, wanting to say more and unable to find the right words.

"I am," said Esme. Redundantly. "When Edward broke up with your daughter, he… He only had her happiness in mind, I can assure you. It might've not been right, but he had the best intentions. He wanted her to have what he didn't think he could give her, always believing that she would find it or build it herself without him in the way. Because he thought he was an obstacle, and I know that's what you and Jacob think. And one of you had been making it unbearably obvious since we came back to Forks, right after Edward's suicide attempt – I don't know if he'll ever forgive himself for causing Bella that kind of suffering or if he'll ever feel better about himself, but this isn't helping, Charlie."

He went still, his breath gone heavy inside his lungs, and the return of her delicacy wore a layer of old despair which echoed faintly the sound of a pain that he knew well.

But not as well as Carlisle and Esme.

"Edward tried to kill himself?"

The discovery spiraled across his vague idea of how things had been for the Cullens meanwhile, and it crashed into his image of the unnaturally polite kid who apparently had everything under control. Most of it anyway. His recent acknowledgement of the boy's destructibility, of his human and still adolescent status, acted as fuel for the explosion.

"He was… in a pretty bad place after we left," Carlisle explained. "Then something happened… There was a misunderstanding, and he was pushed over the edge."

His emotions didn't levitate above his frame like a matinal mist, as Esme's did; they lay amidst the amber in his eyes, the gates to a dungeon that kept them confined, and Charlie saw their side beyond the mirror that he'd put up in front of him, where only his, Bella's, Jacob's stories were reflected.

When had he become this inconsiderate? Bella was okay now, but she'd been getting better even before the Cullens had returned. Probably, like Edward had thought, she would have moved on eventually. Would've found something elsewhere. And Edward, with a wrecked self-esteem, like nothing Charlie had heard of before – would he have done same?

Suicide. The word rang in his head amidst the fuzz. Christ – when did one get to that stage?

"I'm sorry. I didn't know," Charlie said, and his hands closed in on his knees.

He hadn't known anything – that the kid thought so lowly of himself. That Bella influenced _his _life like this.

How _did _the Cullens feel about that?

He wanted them to be okay with her presence, for her to feel accepted, and it dawned on him that Carlisle and Esme probably wanted that for their son, too. For him not to feel like an _obstacle._

Suicide. Jesus. If he had known…

"All we ask is that you speak to Jacob's father," Carlisle said. "I've noticed that you two are close friends – perhaps he'll listen to you. We really would rather not have to deal with an incident of this sort again."

"I–Of course," he hurried to reassure them. "Guess it's the least I can do."

"Thank you very much." A grateful smile hoisted the corners of Carlisle's mouth, and the importance of this one simple action was accentuated, reunited with the discovery of the Cullens' reminiscent fears. Of Edward's brokenness, infinitely more serious than a world-weary personality. _Goddamnit, I could've been nicer to him._ "I apologize for keeping you here for such a long time, Charlie. You must be anxious to go back home with Bella."

A grunt trembled in his throat. Indeed, the game with the Seahawks wouldn't be cancelled on account of these particular issues, and he could do with a trade between the cold white of the Cullens' house and the familiarity of his own home.

But there was something he still needed to do.

He stood up, and swiped an inexistent patch of dust off his jacket.

"I hope you don't mind if I have a word with Edward first."

**()**

Night shadows floated above the bed sheets, twisted through the lines carved into Emily's cheek, or at least part of them, rooted in the fraction of skin that wasn't buried in the hollow of the pillow, and puffed onto them an extension of sleepy darkness which heightened the sound of their breathing. _Her_ breathing – so constant, so precious, the phantom of a languid kiss laid upon his ear, a quiet reassurance that he always craved at the end of the day. Her warm flesh lulled the tension beneath his into a coma, rested soft and consistent under his hand, amidst the shadows and the cotton of her old sweater, and the lone stroke of moonlight that was flicked across her face allowed him a peek into the fluid black of her eyes.

His fingers pressed against the small of her back.

"Thanks," he mumbled under the beginning of a quiet yawn. The rain poured outside with a deep chant which embraced the silence of her comprehension – she knew what he was thankful for. It was mainly her existence, her presence, but it was also her hushed support, the willingness of a touch that could as well be a balm for his stressed, fragmented mind.

"Sam," Emily whispered, the sound emerging softly from the dormant dark. "How much do you trust the Cullens, if you trust them at all?"

He wasn't bothered by this, by the evocation of a subject which until then had weighed like bricks on his mind. Emily held him to the world of the living, but in moments like this she pulled him into the section where his sense of self was a priori and everything else was possibly part of the downpour outside.

"I suppose– enough," he said honestly. A fragile kind of trust was how it could be defined, fomented by the lack of misdeeds, the mingling with the humans in town, the comradery shown without charge. None of that changed their nature, but it eased most of his fears about them, planted in him the belief that peace between them and the tribe (_without the barely contained hate_) could be a constant. He'd thought he was incapable of communicating through spoken language with them, only through Edward's mailing, unless it was extremely necessary, but clearly that'd been a wrong idea.

"I didn't get to thank him," she murmured, and Sam unfolded the regret in her voice until the reasons behind its presence became clear. His chest exhaled through the breathing holes in the mortar that he'd had to fill the old cracks with, because she valued him, worried over his safety, and it was the greatest feeling in the world.

"Would you like to?" he murmured back, because his mind posed no objections. After today's events he thought life in La Push was possibly much more daring than on the other side of the border. Besides, he was grateful, too, for having been warned before his physical integrity could embark on the chance of being corrupted. Rosalie was the blond one, the territorial one, and she was evidently more hostile than the others, and Jasper… He had a projectable gift that made him potentially dangerous, and his aura frothed above a casual sort of indifference which contrasted sharply against Edward and Carlisle's noticeable empathy. The risk had been lurking, and perhaps it'd never show itself in daylight – perhaps nothing would've happened, but Edward had made an effort anyway, had acted responsibly when he could've just let it go, especially after what Jacob had done to him.

"Yeah."

A flash of light gushed into the room and dispersed in less than a second, and moments later a loud rumble was heard, amongst the white noise created by the rain.

"That's okay," Sam mumbled, and shifted slowly, bending his arm behind his head. Dead tree leaves mingled in the ceiling, fluttering eerily against the natural light filtered by the window panes. A distant kind of worry settled into the space behind his breastbone and perturbed only slightly the beating of his pumping muscle, returning from the near past with a gentler approach. "Emily," he sighed.

She ran her hand over his bare stomach, and replied with a whisper, "Yes?"

"What do I do?"

"Sleep," she hummed against his shoulder. His torso shook around the low laugh that flipped his lungs – a laugh that died peacefully, amidst the hope contained in the seriousness of his question.

"Should I be stricter?" he wondered. He'd also thought the hardest phase was over, that they were over their volatile stage, and now there were only the younger ones to worry about.

"This isn't your fault, Sam." Emily twisted beneath the bed sheets until her head was lying on his chest. "I know it feels like the pack is running hot, like something might blow up at any moment, but what happened today is between Edward and Jacob. That much is clear."

"Yeah," he breathed. It didn't take a genius to figure that Jacob's reasons for attacking the telepath were rooted in a particular issue, something that didn't involve the pack. In fact, they'd all seen the images that'd flitted across his mind just before he'd jumped. "But it's just – everyone just stood around. He laid there in pain for a good ten minutes, and Seth was the only one who tried to see if he was okay. And it bothers me, because I'm sure that if it was the other way around any one of us would be getting help right away. Hell, Edward fought his way out of whatever stupor he was in to help me, while I only moved when he passed out trying to get away from us_._"

The peacefulness of the moment withered away, only to be replaced by palpable guilt, a stone that clanked against the pit of his stomach.

"You couldn't ignore his nature," Emily said softly.

"Why does he have to ignore mine?"

That quieted them both for a couple of minutes. Of course – Sam didn't actually believe that his pack was _that _lucky. The Cullens had their reservations as well, partly bred in a blurry reflection of the wolves' distaste, but at least they saw them as people worthy of assistance and common courtesy. The more he mused, the more his pack and even the tribe's blatancy, the boasting of their hate for the Cullens, seemed like an instrument of pathetic oppression. The image of a dog barking and snarling at an immobilized feline wouldn't leave his head.

Say the cougar had been put in a cage, considered too dangerous to be out there, and seeing no movement the dog went on barking, snarling, responding irrationally to the presence of another animal.

But seeing as they were rational he could justify their behavior by arguing that they were the good ones, that they didn't suck blood, that they were better than any Cullen by nature.

He could say no more. None of that made sense to him now.

Damn, he was tired.

"I'm meeting with the Council tomorrow morning," he muttered, closing his eyes. His lungs emptied themselves with a sound that overshadowed the static outside, and he felt his muscles melting onto the sheets, his tension sinking into the mattress, and Emily becoming warmth and softness, undefined, against his side.

"It'll be fine," she said. Faintly. Like she was falling under as well.

Sam threaded his fingers through the thick strands of her hair, caressed them, while the rain beat unbidden against the windows, and only stopped when sleep wrapped him up in its gentle hug.


	5. From Dawn to Dusk

**()**

"The swaying of the ship has been so violent that the best-hung lamps have finally overturned."

– Paul Valéry, _Crisis of the Mind_

**()**

The following morning bloomed into La Push with a sunlit fog that heralded a mostly unclouded day, shining a million hues imperceptible to the naked eye, vibrating off the molecules ingrained in the mist, and a fake stillness buzzing with the movement of the wildlife in the forest laid over the moist ground. A smell embedded in freshness and life pended from the roof of Sam's mouth, as he scraped off with his thumbnail a leaf of faded red paint that'd been peeling itself off the wall of Billy Black's house even before he'd touched it.

Sue was the one to answer the door, alert and severe, her face somehow similar to a sculpture made out of copper sheets, forcefully bent to shape a set of features that still looked abnormally sharp. Sam wished she'd joined the Council before the death of her husband, for no reason other than the fact that she had a hell of a character. Or – better than that would be if she took over the leadership of the pack. Not that he was looking to sweep the amount of responsibility off his shoulders – it was just that she was… _strong_ and firm and, most importantly, respectable. Perhaps if _she _were the Alpha, Jacob wouldn't even have _dared._

"I sent him away. Thought it'd be better to go over this and make a decision without him here…" Billy was saying beyond the pressing smallness of the hallway, while Sam trailed after Leah and Seth's mother. Apparently Billy had figured that the meeting wouldn't graze too many bumps if Jacob was not present, but Sam didn't get to hear more, because his voice hid under a cough that welcomed the pack leader into the living room, exhausting the conversation with Old Quil, who looked frail and ancient, like a piece of cracked clay, against the blue patterns on the flannel armchair.

"Morning," Sam greeted minutely, with a nod that resembled Sue's, and both Billy and Old Quil replied in Quileute. He sat on the vacant couch, feeling the matinal coldness that came from the open window behind him flow over the back of his neck. His fingers threaded together above the abyss between his knees, but he looked at the three of them then and swore to himself that he'd maintain the posture throughout the rest of the meeting.

What he had to say craved the company of an evident and fearless acceptance of the possible consequences. He was no mouse – he was a man, and he should act as such.

"I think it's useless to retell the most recent events, since you already heard that when I called you yesterday. But," he said evenly, stressing the adversity of the conjunction, "before we get down to the heart of the question, I want you to know that I'm taking full responsibility for Edward Cullen's–" (Eyes widened; mouths tightened; backs straightened.) "–entry into our territory, since I was the one who told him that he _could, _which means that if the Council refuses to accept it as something necessary or even helpful then I am the only one at fault, just as I am the only one who has to suffer the consequences."

Of course there was a tense silence after that, saturated with disbelief and anger, and these were held back by the chanting of jays in the distance. The patches of skin around Billy's eyes had hardened into pine bark during the night, with all the creases that'd been carved there by a subject that spoke of trouble and his son at the same time, but the unexpectedness of Sam's decision set his eyes ablaze and revived the dry wood with astounding quickness. This is new, their faces seemed to say. It was new and hardly approvable.

Sam found himself wondering how things would be like if all of them gave more value to the _technically. _Since _technically _he held the higher power, had the final say, and surely there'd be no point in the Council trying to hand out some sort of punishment. Perhaps once he was older his decisions wouldn't be put to question; but for now he had to bear the strain that the process of protecting someone who'd done nothing wrong entailed.

Damn him if anyone touched Edward Cullen with a single finger because of this.

"The Cold One infringed the rules," Quil Ateara rasped, his gaze flashing behind the thick lenses of his glasses, and Sam thought the accusation was pointless. It wouldn't change his recently tidied-up mind.

"No, he didn't," Sam countered, his voice deepening under the resolution that filled him. "The leader of the pack is the most important representative of the tribe. I chose to accept Edward Cullen's offer to supportively participate in the chase, and he believed me when I _clearly_ assured him that it was alright for him to cross the border. I spoke for all the tribe, and maybe I shouldn't have. But that's my problem, not his."

He felt as if he were playing a war game, using absolute honesty as a strategy, and since he wasn't familiar with divergence, with the ways that strayed from the _right path, _he was briefly touched by guilt. But, he reminded himself, this _was _the right path – he'd foreboded the manner in which the Council would eventually be led by prejudice and focus on an alleged offense committed by a Cullen rather than an actual offense committed by one of their own.

He'd dived straight into the practice of his plan, invaded without warning the square that they refused to leave, and he could sense their mild helplessness through the thumping of their hearts inside his head, gathered in a circus drum roll.

"We don't know if the _vampire _had any ulterior motives," said Sue, and there was a pointed something in her tone which made Sam wonder whether she thought that he was that gullible. An expected course of events would have him either second-guessing himself or refuting her theory, but he was full of surprises today – he hoped Old Quil's heart could handle it all.

"Well, yeah, of course he had," he said casually, and they froze into a state of temporary confusion. "But if I didn't have an ulterior motive myself I wouldn't have allowed him to cross the boundary line."

Silence ensued once more, until Sue settled back in her armchair, her face subtly twisted in an ambiguous expression. As if the idea that she got from his words was causing her a minor sort of distress which she couldn't understand herself.

"So… this was planned?" she reasoned. "Was it… a _trap_?"

Obviously the thought was disturbing – deceiving someone so that they could be dragged into a pothole. What if it'd happened to either Seth or Leah? Or Jacob. Most likely hell's worst nightmares would be unleashed upon the Cullens! It just wasn't _right, _to take advantage of someone's apparent good will, even if they had second intentions. An attack of that sort, based on – quite simply – a preconceived idea, would be in most circumstances… enraging.

Sam gave them time to consider that, but not enough to build a suspicious sort of suspense over the three of them, all the while knowing that it was especially _that _word that bothered them. _Trap. _It alluded to something… oppressive. As if Edward was the mouse and they were the mouse_trap._

He shook his head, frowning. "No," he said. "I'm a man of principle, Sue."

Harsh, perhaps. The statement was a north wind pushing, invisible, against the impermeable brass of their visages. But it was bound to happen – these rocks had the power to shape dents into hard surfaces, instead of slipping softly beneath them, as they would if they were the same as the face of a lake. Because this put things under a different light, one that they wanted to shy away from – in that supposed situation they would've been the villains, for certain, and the thought of being in that position was just too hard to stand. The fact that they'd deemed the act acceptable for a couple of moments made cracks sprout within their brittle minds.

Although Old Quil's could be sealed quickly.

"But it should've been," he grumbled. "We need to protect ourselves."

Sam's blood bubbled up in contained effervescence, and a slight pulse beat unsteady against the front of his skull. Even though he'd also seen this beforehand. How come nobody'd risen up against an attitude like this in the past?

"Protecting ourselves implies eliminating invaders, and that's about it. That's what we've been doing up until now. It doesn't mean that we have to seek out ways to hurt our enemies when the only reason why they're our enemies is because they belong to a different species–"

"Sam–" Billy tried to placate him.

"We established a _truce. _It's still standing. Because the Cullens haven't done anything to break it, but I'm afraid I can't say the same for us, since one of them was led to believe that he could step onto our territory without being the subject of an attack that could have him losing a _limb_–"

"Sam…"

"So, really, I'm not surprised that one of the first things you thought was that this was a _trap. _An uncalled-for scheme meant to injure someone who'd been deceived. Because that's exactly what it looks like, and it might as well be the impression that the Cullens were left with."

"Sam, listen–"

"Edward Cullen had to wait in pain for hours until he could get help from Dr. Cullen. His _leg_ was about to fall off. His knee was absolutely _crushed_. I had to carry him back to my house so that I didn't have to take him to _their _house and have to explain that our second-in-command had decided to attack him. I can only imagine how much they would've liked to hear that." A bitter laugh chased up the walls of his throat. "So we'd all better pray that the Cullens don't decide to rightfully start a war against us. Because let's face it: that's what we would've done if it'd been the other way around."

Sam finished speaking with the beginnings of a convulsive transformation rocking his flesh, caged and frenetic. He felt deaf. The world seemed bare of noise and post-apocalyptic, with all its conventions and traditions and cultures and languages burying themselves like moles under the havoc that'd been loosed upon them.

He thought the silence made things clearer, was golden, and then the trembling dissipated, extravasated into an atmosphere that'd been lacking in the seriousness needed to face the facts. The members of the Council were shocked and then pensive; and Sam knew better than most how dangerous an outburst like this could be, but he was just so fucking glad he'd let it out.

It was probably the only way they would actually _understand _it anyway.

"I'm sorry, Sam," Billy apologized, finding his voice amidst a scrambling of thoughts which scarred it and made it sound rough. "On my son's behalf, I'm sorry."

He wasn't the one Billy should be apologizing to, but Sam bit his tongue. There was only so much he could ask for after all. Besides, Jacob's father was giving a clear, open sign that he was seeing reason in regard to what his son had done, what it could have… What it could still cause.

He leaned forward with a sigh imbued in Billy's shame, and folded his fingers in between loose links, feeling… sympathetic. Uneasy. Perhaps this would be more difficult for Billy than for Jacob, and that's what irked him the most.

"Billy, I'm sure you understand… I can't let this pass. Jacob needs to learn that he can't do whatever he wants."

The other nodded, his mouth slanting under a melancholy that Sam was too young to understand completely. From a certain distance it seemed like a medley of disappointment and empathetic shame, although upon a closer look one could catch the inner reflection present in the opaqueness of his eyes. But most importantly there was acceptance.

It was a small victory, at least in the way Sam saw it.

"Jacob is the true heir of the Alpha title," Old Quil contested, saying the rest with his short-sighted eyes. Jacob should have the final say, according to tradition. Or decide along with Sam, seeing as he was second-in-command.

Sam clenched his hands, his nerves worn down by the frail man's opposition, acting as some sort of _taunt. _He didn't want to mention the fact that he _was _the chief of the tribe and these things were up to _him, _but Old Quil seemed to be almost _asking for it_.

He made a gesture that indicated that he agreed completely. With what he'd said. Not with what he'd probably thought.

"As we all know, of course… But we also know that Jacob rejected that same title for his own sake, so he didn't just hand over his obligations. He also handed over his rights as the Alpha. But obviously he can claim all of these, both the responsibilities and the privileges." Sam gave them a small shrug, which secretly amused him. "Whenever he's ready," he said smoothly.

He could take that risk. What he could not do was spinelessly back down from doing what was right.

"You still didn't tell us what your…motives were exactly," Sue pointed out. Curiosity mellowed her voice and encouraged him to tell the truth without hesitancy.

"Well, if my guesses are right… Edward and I were in agreement. Favors like this could be pretty useful to us, but obviously we have to give something back."

Now he twisted subtly in his seat. He'd understand if they didn't accept his idea, which was, he thought, the likeliest scenario. He could already feel the tension rise off their raised shoulders.

Sue lifted a wary eyebrow. "And what would that be?"

"It would benefit us all if we altered some of the clauses in the treaty," he said lowly. "Particularly in what concerns… the transformation of a human."

"No," Billy fired immediately, and inwardly Sam flinched. "Bella will _not _become one of them."

"Then try to deter her. Convince her to stay human. But if she doesn't waver we have to find some way to prevent a war, Billy. I know you all think that the pack is strong enough to win, but the truth is that the chances are low. There'd be deaths on our side. You know that's what would happen. The Cullens are not driven by bloodlust like the newborns."

"And… they have a mind-reader," Sue added in, and the brown of her eyes twirled around all the possible things Edward could do in a battle. Especially to her children. His pack mates. His friends. That's what he wanted them to _think_ about.

"Yes. Jacob could do the same to him as he did yesterday, distract him, but then he'd be distracted, too. Besides, I'm pretty sure the Cullens know others that would be willing to help them fight against us. They're friends with another coven from Alaska. And there's Jasper. He's an expert strategy-wise, and I've seen what he can do with his gift."

"Which is?" Sue pressed.

"He can control emotions."

There was a pause, a heavy one, during which all this information registered in their minds, to be processed, assembled with a dozen different scenarios, all of them spine-chilling.

"You think this will keep the tribe safe?" Billy asked, searching for reassurance.

"If we don't start the fire we won't get burnt, Billy. The Cullens are not exactly interested in fighting against us, but if we choose to attack them we can't really expect them to stay still and let us do the killing."

He knew then that he'd get his way. Old Quil would probably just surrender under the force of the majority and inwardly stick to the convictions of an age when people were willing to die for something they believed in, even if the cause didn't have a consistent base, but Billy was already recalling the day when his son had come home with broken bones and screams and curses bursting from his lungs. And Sue was imagining one of her children in his place.

But it wouldn't come to that. There was a new concept and it was a great one – moderation.

"We should start a draft," Sue said, the quick angles of her features brightening up with the determination that covered them. "I'll go get some paper."

She stood up, ready to get things rolling, to create a new treaty, a new document that'd replace the one the tribe had been quoting for decades, and Sam felt his ribcage loosen up some, although there was still something that he wanted them to take care of as well.

"What about Jacob?"

Sue turned to Billy, as if asking him for the go-ahead, which he did give, albeit despondently.

"I'll get paper for that, too."

"Thank you," Sam sighed. They weren't going to prolong the conversation. The mention of their children had been enough to speed them up. Splendid – he had other things to do. "I'll call Carlisle Cullen and ask to drop by so that his coven can be better informed about the change in the treaty and Jacob's punishment, but meanwhile I'll gather the pack and line them up behind the border. Just in case."

Billy's chest expanded like an inflated bellow, quickly, aggressively. "Is there any danger?" he questioned, fearful. The graveness of what Jacob had done was printing itself onto his brain. His son hadn't simply acted like, well, an asshole; he had also put his whole tribe in jeopardy because of a love-related _grudge._ And Sam could admit to understanding it better if he had imprinted on Bella, but, for goodness' sake, she was just a _girl. _A couple of years from now he'd be going after somebody else, possibly his imprint.

He wondered often if Jacob had ever _considered _that. And he also hoped that one day something less drastic than him imprinting on someone and having to let go of a relationship that he'd built for years would make him see, without crushing him with the guilt that Sam was still carrying, beyond the present and himself and into _the impact that his decision could have on other people's lives_.

"Honestly, Billy, I don't think so," he said frankly. "If I negotiate this with them it'll probably be a good enough compensation. But surely a few hours off the pack's time won't really hurt anyone. And… it'll keep my mind at ease."

It wasn't quite rational – Sam had it ingrained in him, really. He didn't believe that the Cullens would suddenly burst into their territory and start snapping the necks of anyone who crossed their path. Most likely their leader would find a way to prevent an incident of this sort from happening again, or his leniency would give in when faced with the coven's opinions and they'd end up sending an honest warning, no bluffing involved.

Sam was so mad – cruel as it sounded he wished Jacob would be thrown out. For a moment, he really did. If said warning was sent and if a member of the pack wasn't careful enough the Cullens would have more than enough reason to tear through diplomacy straight into a bloodbath – and Jacob had a _tendency_ to exploit people's patience.

Particularly Edward's – this wasn't the first time he assaulted the mind-reader's head with images and thoughts meant to provoke him and actually _wound _him. Some of his satisfied memories were passed around the pack when they were all in wolf form, and until recently Sam had merely been annoyed at his daring antics, directed at a Cullen, a potentially dangerous enemy, as well as his closeness to Bella Swan – no, not his closeness, but the fact that she knew more about the pack than most humans outside the tribe because of him certainly sparked some irritation. It annoyed Sam even more that most of the other members of their group respected these simple rules. That _Sam_ respected these simple rules.

But now he was also dealing with a quiet sense of protectiveness towards the most unexpected person, and the way Jacob treated said person scratched and screeched against his own patience.

No, he didn't find it odd. Not after the dream he'd had.

"You're a good leader, Sam," Billy said, sincerity rooted in his voice and his eyes and Sam didn't know what to think. Being a good leader didn't matter as much to him as doing what good leaders did.

But he was… touched, deep in his heart, and wished he had a present father who would tell him this.

He gave Billy a small, thankful nod, as he pushed down the frozen ache and the old anger, like he always did.

**()**

One of Sam's high school teachers (who was dead by now, unfortunately) had once dived into a rant that'd made the edges of his visions blur, his mind fall slowly under a waddling tide which distorted all sounds until they seemed to be reaching him from a faraway land.

The subject was Biology, but somehow, at some point, Sigmund Freud was thrown into the one-sided conversation. The teacher was known and mocked for startling his students with some random topic enveloped in a near-shout, so Sam deduced that all of it had come up unexplainably, with no link to his previous thread. As usual, the man used too many words to say very little – Freud was overrated, or so it seemed. Sam's attention floated back to the surface very suddenly, because there was a lecture about dreams and such going on and that was kind of interesting; but he'd been disappointed to hear that much of it was negative criticism, with a touch of possibly biased admiration for Carl Jung, who had been Freud's friend and probably wouldn't have appreciated the teacher's tone. The bias, he thought then, was a product of the man's ties to his culture and beliefs – Jung defended the idea that dreams contained important messages, and of course the teacher interpreted the thesis as a complementation of a spiritual perspective.

Perhaps it was and Sam's teacher was right. Or perhaps not. Either way Sam quickly decoded his dream – and not in the Freudian way. He ignored symbolisms and unconscious desires and sexual traumas and came to a conclusion that kept him awake for the rest of the night and marked him deeply for the rest of his life.

A sickly distortion of the late afternoon's events invaded his subconscious. The beginning of the story was very much the same: an unknown vampire flitting through the trees in pale flashes which blinded his sight and pressed on the always-existing fear that they wouldn't manage to catch him. Then there was the irony of having his anxiety soothed by a creature of the same kind, ghost-looking, bizarre in the manner it moved, freed from earthly restraints. The vampire slipped into the chase in a blaze of white and orange-brown, ginger hair fluttering wildly, and quickly outran them, a bipedal, more than a foot shorter than the average wolf, and abnormally, infuriatingly fast.

Then the dream changed, took a drastic turn that brushed against the cosmos of the macabre.

The presence of the other members of the pack and the nomadic vampire were merely a smear contrasting against the vividness of a particular situation. Sam didn't know why he did it – in dreams people didn't try to find an explanation for the images that played out. He just went for the vampire's leg, jaws clamping around his knee, and bones crunched inside his mouth – and of course he didn't _taste _it, but he was sure, surer even when he stepped back and let the creature fall onto the ground like a rag doll, that his teeth were soaked in blood.

Edward was screaming. In the real version he'd been admiringly silent, but in this one he was screaming, voice stretching like a cello string, out of tune, bothersome in its raw hysteria. Sam thought he wouldn't have endured it, or he would've borne it just barely, if the situation took place in the world of the living and the conscious; but as it was the scene went on, and his breathing quickened, the air slipping out of his lungs onto Emily's head in soft rasps, though his dream-self was unaware of what he was feeling. Edward's screams died in his gasping, convulsing throat, his skin ashen beneath the dampness that poured from his eyes.

Which were not black, or red, or even yellow. There was an enamel clearness to them which would've made him seem, if it hadn't been a dream, like a Celtic descendant in the whole. Later on, once Sam had given his pack a nice dose of work, while he was driving across the outskirts of town with Sue on the passenger seat, he remembered, by some miracle, this one detail; and for the very first time he wondered about the geographic origins of a Cold One.

The redhead was shaking all over. The leg of his ripped jeans, turned some shades darker, imbued with blood, tore into two parts at a knee that was mangled and out of place and broken, so obviously broken, and the blood kept running, slithering over the ground and feeding the undergrowth. And amidst all the red, the red of the blood and the red of the frayed flesh beneath the skin that Sam's teeth had sunk into, there was a sliver of white, the horrifying face of a fractured bone peeking at him from under a tangle of tissues and tendons and muscles, supple and exposed.

The thump-thump pounding in his head slowed down, became a fading sound. Edward's chest was rising lower and falling gentler, as more blood was shed onto the forest ground. On a face as pale as paper, a pair of lashes flittered weakly.

"Sam." His name rolled out of his mouth in a faint whisper, bowing under the sound of guns being charged and readied in the distance. "Run," he exhaled, closed his eyes, died. His heartbeat was cut off, and his body went limp, and Sam woke up with a jerk of his neck which hurt and pulled Emily from her slumber as well.

She wrapped herself around him, kissed his neck, repeated as if it were a mantra that it'd been nothing but a nightmare. His arms held her body close, pulsing along with it like they were one, and the tickling of her hair on his skin didn't calm him at first because all this terror welded onto his memory and he let it – he _wanted _to remember it in the morning. Wanted the thrum of its significance to join him in his relentless trot through life.

He was tired of looking at the rest of the world and seeing it as a blurry mass.

Just as he was tired of looking into himself and feeling the bites of a dozen incongruences.

**()**

Jacob, according to the draft, would lose his position in the pack. He'd have to abdicate his role as second-in-command and let it be occupied by some other shifter with a larger sense of responsibility and a more… peaceful love life. Friendship life. _Whatever. _In addition, any attempt to take over the leadership of the pack would be in vain, at least for five years, regardless of his bloodline, given that the Council and the other wolves wouldn't recognize his authority. Of course Jacob would have to sign it for it to become an official document, but the possibility of him refusing to do so hadn't even _crossed _their minds.

So it wasn't a deal_. _It was more of a diktat.

Edward's teeth clanked together behind his tightly closed mouth. They were overreacting. The whole lot of them. So Jacob had broken his leg – _big deal. _Edward had done enough to deserve it, and, hell, even his mere, pointless, abhorrent existence was a sufficient justification. And now someone was paying and being humiliated because he'd gone out of his way to diminish the sacrifice that the inclusion of his fiancé in said existence naturally implied. Sometimes he wondered why in the hell he even _did _things – weren't the results always at odds with the intentions? Of course, he knew – only dead fish followed the stream. But if one swam back against the current only to make a ship sink each damn time then something was obviously very wrong. People weren't pre-programmed to fail, that much he was aware of, but clearly his reasoning in most situations was just– wrong.

Even Bella thought so. She didn't say it outright, but he knew she thought so and it hurt.

The familiar ache snapped in his chest like a broken string, making Jasper look away from the throbbing movement in Sue's neck, the pumping of blood underneath. She smelled mostly of reeking wetness, but beneath that there was a particular scent which evoked an image of Eastern spices.

She had fantastic self-control for a human – Jasper's stare made her extremely uncomfortable, but for the most part she didn't let it show.

"As for the treaty," Sam continued, "we've decided to open an exception, but you will have to move. That's our one condition."

Rosalie's thoughts swelled dangerously inside Edward's head. _Who the HELL does he think he is? Moronic freaking dog... Thinking he can control us. Whatever. I'm done with this stupid town anyway. But if it weren't for Edward's little greenhouse flower…_

"Of course," Carlisle said with a placating nod. Emmett was mildly disappointed – he'd been looking forward to the traditional dispute that Jacob's deed would have triggered if their coven leader weren't so lenient. Now he'd just have to wait for an encounter with the man himself.

Edward shot his brother a glare from the other side of the living room, wishing he'd stop making up scenarios in which he broke something of Jacob's as well. Maybe his teeth. The unfolding of this one act was stretching too much – Jacob was already being painted as some sort of black sheep by his wolf pack, and obviously Sam was basing his decision on his concern for the tribe's safety, but he was also darkening the image of his second-in-command (who would soon not be considered as such) because of a misplaced sense of responsibility over Edward's well-being.

_First Charlie. And now Sam_. What was _wrong _with them?

"That should be all," the Alpha murmured almost to himself, thrown off guard by the buzzing irritation ingrained in the air. His too flattering expectations had been swept and scrubbed and wiped by the sight of five irritable vampires whose barely existent composure made them comparable to a dysfunctional family putting on a poor show for the picture.

Alice's visions were a mess, frayed and cratered, falling into abysses whenever anything werewolf-related burst into the future, and her near-blindness set her usual enthusiasm ablaze, pressed her against the corner of the living room, where she was sulking with her arms crossed over her chest.

Consequently, Jasper's defensiveness rose up like a prison wall, topped by barbed wire, and, knowing that Sam's presence was the main cause of his mate's distress, he daggered the shifter's broad frame with ochre eyes frozen in an amalgam of bloodlust and wariness and anger.

Emmett's easy-going nature would've been more enhanced if he had anything to say, but as it was his silence added to his size a doubtful quality; but, besides that, his thoughts were still hanging off the effects of yesterday's occurrence, and the older brother in him compelled him in a reverberation of a voice to find Jacob and give him a good scare coupled with a warning.

And Rosalie… Well, her foul mood was not exactly a novelty.

Edward, though, was the worst of them. His mind, a minefield on which the others' smoking thoughts boomed, had become bruised, reddened, and cracked open an itch that had his jaws clenching and his eyebrows furrowing. The wet-dog smell washed over his tongue like a pool of stagnant water, infectious and nauseating, and his recently fed stomach heated up uncomfortably, unexplainably. The world in general aggravated the vermilion hue of his erratic spirit.

Eventually Sam and Sue bid their goodbyes, both relieved to slip through the clutches of the palpable tension pending over the Cullen family. Sue had come with only because she was an available representative of the tribal council, but Sam hadn't dropped by without particular motives. Exasperation rumbled lowly in Edward's chest, as the pack leader asked him through his thoughts if he could have a word with him outside.

"You're not helping any," Carlisle said, speaking to the five of them. Next to him Esme frowned disapprovingly.

Edward repressed just barely the prickling urge to roll his eyes. This wasn't that much of an interesting paradox, the contrast between their approach towards Charlie and their wish to make a good impression on Sam. First they portrayed Edward as some sort of pacifistic victim, brushed Charlie's vision of him with golden strokes, and simultaneously spread graphite shadows over Jacob's image. And now that everyone was precisely aware of what had happened in reality and they had a chance to demonstrate their discontentment and avoid another incident like this, Carlisle focused on keeping up appearances, as if the Quileute people would ever buy the saint-like attitude.

He pushed himself off the wall and walked gingerly across the room, frustrated by the feeling of sheer wrongnessin his leg.

"We're not _meant _to be trusted," he muttered, a belief that'd supposedly been eliminated voiced all of a sudden. They could perhaps try it with Charlie, who'd been around long enough to surpass the instinctive fear which their nature sparked in the human mind, but the wolves knew _what_ they were.

Carlisle took hold of his forearm in a fraction of a half-second, stopping him from walking out of the house, and a noise like a screech caused by bad reception tore through both of their minds.

"We're going back to this?" he asked quietly.

Edward stilled instantly, head either emptying or freezing upon the look in his sire's darkening eyes – a look which drilled into a dimension that he didn't understand, didn't fully acknowledge, and disappeared almost immediately, overshadowed by a miscellany of guilt-inducing emotions. Carlisle's inner reflection splintered under the contrariety of his disciple's opinion.

"No, Father," Edward whispered, shame coloring in greys the crimson excitability from before. "I'm sorry."

Of course. Carlisle _could _be trusted. Unlike him. Edward had been projecting his self-loathing onto his family, had been ignoring the effort they put into being worthy of other people's trust, extracting from them the qualities that made them so much better than he was. The conversation with Charlie had warred with a silent, fiery opposition that'd dragged onto the next day and stirred his mood until it boiled and poured out through the limits that he should've established more thoroughly. _Of course_. He had no right to extend the way he saw himself to the rest of his family. To Carlisle and Esme, whose kindness outshone the highest standards.

They were loving and caring and for the thousandth time Edward had upset them, and a feeling of incomprehensible loss slipped into his lungs and festered there like a decay-scented breath. Jasper eyed him strangely as he walked out of the house.

Sam was waiting at the end of the driveway, his hands converted into spheres inside the pockets of his cutoffs, and his pulse detuned itself upon Edward's white and sudden appearance. The evening sunlight slanted across the gravel on the ground and perfused the scattered grass blades with a fluid red-gold shine, beaming off the minerals solidified into the tiny stones. The dying iridescence hummed faintly over Edward's skin as well; self-conscious, he embroiled himself in the darkness of the woods, where he didn't seem so unearthly, while Sam followed him silently.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "We could've tried to make you feel more at ease."

"It's fine." Sam's face twisted slightly in confusion. Only moments before Edward had looked downright annoyed, petulant, and now a definite sadness rested on his wound-red mouth. "How's your leg?"

"Almost completely healed."

"I'm glad to hear that," Sam admitted, translating the feelings of a new-found piece of his spirit, a part of him which accepted the differences between them and, in some way, held Edward in esteem. "I wanted to thank you. For telling me to go back."

So _that _was the reason. It was understandable, logical, stemming from the kind of mentality that someone as mature as Sam would have. Edward tacitly returned his admiration: he'd taken it upon himself to get everything in order before it could fall into disorder, faced the council with a head held high and his sense of fairness determining his decisions, found the courage to go over the Cullen house and apologize for the sake of the ones he cared about.

And to think that only minutes ago he'd been included in the list of things that'd added to Edward's irritation.

_Idiot. That's what you are. A goddamn idiot._

He gave Sam a small smile, despite his self-directed anger, careful not to put his blade-sharp teeth on display.

"You're welcome."

The other nodded, serious, always serious. It occurred to him that Sam, if his pack's thoughts were any indication, didn't smile much, except for the lone moments when Emily was nearby and his dark eyes strayed to hers. Leah's nostalgia – no, her _saudade _– shimmered over fragments of memories in which his face morphed and brightened for _her, _back when she had more reasons to smile, too, and Edward was tempted to ask if this was the sole cause of Sam's constant soberness, or if there was more to his earlier life which had made it grow into his character.

Either way Edward thought that he should do something for the pack leader, no specific reason breeding the wish and in spite of the annoyance that began to well in him once more when Sam's thoughts became tinged again with worry over his welfare. As well as a whimsical interest in something completely unrelated to Jacob or his leg or even his family.

Sam refrained from trying to get his doubts cleared, finding his curiosity odd himself, and slipped away from the forest shadows without saying anything else, and Edward was left alone, defenseless against the return of a dim sort of frustration, a tired sense that the ground was being whisked away from beneath his feet, a heavy feeling in his chest. He broke into a jog, inexplicably satisfied with the ache in his knee, which intensified when he pushed himself harder, ran faster, a masochistic tendency setting the rhythm of his movements.

He understood suddenly that it was everything and nothing all at the same time, in a dose that was not excessive, a pale background for a splattering of thoughts that rejected Charlie's words and Sam's dormant admiration and Carlisle and Esme's belief that he was worthy of just the barest hint of care.

They were wrong. They were all wrong.

**()**

**A.N.: If Edward gives you whiplash and you know it and you really want to show it, clap your hands. (And review.) **


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